


what the water gave me

by Lunarieen



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Panic Attacks, complicated family relationships, hinata shouyou/miya atsumu - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26632810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarieen/pseuds/Lunarieen
Summary: There are three things that Kei likes: his Jinhao fountain pen; his power bank fully charged; his red ankle bracelet.There are three things that Kei doesn’t like: Kuroo Tetsurou; magic; the black cat that keeps following him everywhere.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei
Comments: 25
Kudos: 85
Collections: Luna & Noir: KuroTsuki Fest 2020





	what the water gave me

**Author's Note:**

> prompt #111
> 
> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3e4pDwybyCBtPsJqIbl13U?si=pTJ-c8FBTgy8NCaatxuxjQ)
> 
> **Additional warnings** : recreational drinking/partying; mentions of emotional neglect; unhealthy student life aka not sleep, just coffee; mentions of blood; panic attacks and coping mechanism; mentions of animal abuse; haemophobia; the author has forgotten how to write kisses; the author now wants a cat;
> 
> For the animal abuse tag: it's implied and not graphic. it happens at the end of the story + kei's panic attack related to blood. if you wish to skip it, ctrl+f for- _Kei starts running before he knows what he’s running to_. It ends with _Too bad he can’t scrub his heart until it’s shiny and new again._ (basically the end of that scene). Without giving you spoilers, I'm just going to say it will be alright. 
> 
> A huge thank you to [Laura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lmeden/pseuds/honeydrip) (go read her fics, she's an amazing writer) and [Alina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxdevilishxx) for listening to me crying over this fic <3 this giant baby wouldn't have been possible without them.  
> Mistakes all mine.

* * *

there’s a bluebird in my heart that  
wants to get out  
but I’m too clever, I only let him out  
at night sometimes  
when everybody’s asleep.  
I say, I know that you’re there,  
so don’t be  
sad.

 _bluebird,_ charles bukowski

_s p r i n g_

There are three things that Kei needs to have upon him at all times. His Jinhao fountain pen. A power bank fully charged. His red ankle bracelet.

He has a morning class, and before he leaves his room he checks everything one last time. Bag first, where his pen sits in its silver case. A white lab coat is folded neatly in a green ziplock next to a glass inkwell, packed in a yellow ziplock. The reality of finding the insides of his bag infused with black ink sometimes feels imminent and Kei doesn’t believe in fate but he also doesn’t want to test it. The red string is tight around the bones of his ankle, and when he pulls the white sock over it, it disappears completely. Phone in hand, headphones around his neck, he locks the door behind him and goes to class.

March has come like a kiss. Fleeting, in bursts of sunshine followed by heavy rains and drops in temperature. Kei doesn’t enjoy it when he has to think about clothes for more than two minutes. He definitely doesn’t like it when he steps in puddles and his socks turn grey. But for once, the sky is a bright hazy blue, the pavement is dry, and Kei ducks his head to hide his eyes from the sun as he unlocks his phone.

**Shouyou [8:15]**

u comin to class????

coffee????

vanilla pastry????

im going to yakus

Kei ignores the lack of spelling or punctuation and looks at his watch. Three minutes to 8:30. He replies with _yes, yes, no_. He gets back a row full of blue heart emojis, one he leaves on unread as he taps open the podcast library. He sidesteps a toolbox as he plays the next episode on the list. Steps over a paint bucket as something grabs his ankle — cold, like ice, like bones stripped off their meat — and makes him trip. He whips his head around, stares for a solid second at the hose on the ground and curses whoever didn’t clean up after themselves. He resumes his walk, frowns when a shadow falls over his hands, obscuring his screen for a moment.

He looks up. Stops. Looks over his shoulder.

A metallic ladder is propped up against the wall and he has just walked right below it.

Kei methodically locks his phone and puts it in his back pocket. Heart thundering in his chest, he keeps his back ramrod straight as he walks backward, one step behind another until he finds himself where he started, on the other side of the ladder. For good measure, he takes a minute to make a wish. Then, and only then, his body feels like his own again.

Then, and only then, he dares to go forward, around the ladder, to his class.

It’s another two minutes until his phone buzzes in his pocket. He is well into the open courtyard, surrounded by green, green, green. Something pulls at his heart, splits it open with unnamed feelings. The name on the screen makes him wanna chuck his phone into the pond.

**Kuroo [8:38]**

Good morning sunshine! How are you on such a fine, lovely day?

The three dots are still blinking with the incoming message.

**Kuroo [8:39]**

Did you just walk under a ladder just to go back?

Kei’s heart jumps in his chest. He looks around himself. The only students present are inside the Arts Building, heads, and torsos visible through the tall windows. Kuroo doesn’t go to this school.

**Kei [8:39]**

What are you talking about?

**Kuroo [8:40]**

You did, didn’t you?

Kei closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Kuroo’s smile flashes in his mind, titled to the side, euphoric and mischievous. So sure of itself. He opens his eyes and the image dissolves.

**Kei [8:41]**

I thought I had dropped something.

**Kuroo [8:42]**

Right

Three steps to make sure you didn’t drop anything?

**Kei [8:42]**

Spying on people? What are you, the government?

Go do something useful with your time.

**Kuroo [8:43]**

;)

You know it, babey

But I’m a witch and I looked into my witchy crystal globe

**Kei [8:43]**

Fuck off.

Kuroo sends him a gif with the witch from White Snow cackling over her cauldron. It’s irritating enough that Kei wants to send something equally offensive back, but he gets another message before he can embarrass himself.

**Kuroo [8:44]**

No witchy things. Yachi saw you

She told me and I texted you

Yachi? Kei doesn’t need to look for her because he knows she’s not there. Yachi is away on a studying trip on the other side of the country, where the summer is everlasting. There is no way that Kuroo doesn’t know this. After all, they are _friends_.

**Kei [8:44]**

Of course. They are _not_ real.

**Kuroo [8:44]**

:(

 _They_ have a name

You know it hurts me when you say stuff like that, right?

I’m like...right here

I exist in the same time and space -

Well, not really space, but you know what I mean

**Kei [8:46]**

Of course. The billboard outside our town says that God lives among us

but that doesn’t mean he’s real.

Has anyone seen him?

**Kuroo [8:46]**

God is a woman

But also, cold doesn’t exist either. It is just the absence of heat. You do feel the absence of heat, right?

Shouyou chooses that same moment to barrel into him, balancing two cups in one hand and his dancing equipment in the other. The pungent smell of coffee is enough to distract Kei, his ire quickly replaced by serotonin. He makes grabby hands toward the cup, much to

Shouyou’s amusement.

“Easy there, cowboy,” Shouyou laughs as he hands Kei the coffee. “What got you so uptight in the morning?”

“Ugh,” it’s all Kei says. He takes off the lid, inhales the delicious smell before he drinks from it.

“Ah,” Shouyu laughs as he spins on his left foot, doing something complicated and muscle straining. “Did Kuroo text you?”

“I keep deleting his number or blocking him or—whatever, and somehow he still finds his way back into my contacts.”

“You do know that—”

Kei frowns. “Please don’t.”

“Sure, sure,” Shouyou concedes, palms up to placate Kei. “So, lunch? At the japanese place you like? It’s on me.”

The promise of yaki udon is good enough to carry him through the morning OChem lab. Kei agrees.

“Cool, cool, cool,” Shouyou says, jumping from one foot to another. “See you then.” He winks and waves goodbye, turning to leave. He spins right back, finger guns pointed at Kei. “Did you take your bracelet?”

“Yes. Just go. You’ll be late for class.”

Shouyou leaves for good and Kei presses the side of his sneakers to his other leg, feeling for the bracelet. It’s there, secure and a little bit tight, a constant reminder that everything will be alright. The phone vibrates in his hand.

**Kuroo [8:47]**

anyway, are you coming to the Ostara festival?

It’s next week

Kei briefly wonders what this Ostara festival is. He hasn’t heard about it until that moment, the name sounds ominous and it’s Kuroo who told him about it. The inquiry doesn’t seem to lead to anything good or productive, so Kei shuts down any thought about it. He doesn’t want to know.

**Kuroo [8:48]**

we’re having a small celebration in the woods behind the city

starts on friday, ends on sunday because real life’s a bitch and we’re all adults who have to pay taxes

but i think you’ll like it

good food, good company

celebrate good ol’ mother nature

**Kei [8:53]**

No.

**Kuroo [8:53]**

oh, there you are

i thought you blocked me

**Kei [8:54]**

It’s not like I didn’t try before.

**Kuroo [8:54]**

oh, i know ;)

**Kei [8:54]**

I am not coming to your stupid festival.

I am busy.

**Kuroo [8:55]**

oooh, testy.

suit yourself. you’ll miss the good food and good company.

There are already a few students in class by the time Kei gets there. He goes to his seat next to the window, puts his bag on the chair, and starts preparing. He looks over his class notes, makes a mental list of all the equipment he will need, and goes to get one of the good Bunsen burners before other students snatch it. He looks at his phone one last time just as his TA walks in.

**Kuroo [8:56]**

Kei.

Kei’s fingertips tingle with static electricity. The name jolts his memory and he is suddenly two years younger. He tries to focus on his hands as they measure whatever substance he needs — focus. He needs to focus. His mother won’t accept a son who is not on top of his class. And what could he tell her? _I was thinking about a boy, mom. Sorry about my lame grades._ He puts down the dropper, flexes his fingers. _Focus, Kei._ He can hear Kuroo’s voice saying his name. Morning turns into dawn, an hour before sunset, and the sky is bright enough that it illuminates half the room. It smells like hydrangeas and thunders.

If Kei closes his eyes, spring becomes summer, March becomes May and he is about to finish his first year in college.

**Kuroo [8:56]**

what did you wish for? when walking backward under the ladder?

Kei focuses. He is in his third year with another one to graduate with a chemistry major under his belt and he has another four down the road to becoming a pharmacist. Spring is all around him, wet and desolate, and Kei—

Kei hates Kuroo.

**Kei [9:11]**

I wished for your death.

With that, he locks his phone and doesn’t look at it until lunch, when he needs to text his brother to ask him if he is coming home for their father’s birthday or only in August.

There is no reply from Kuroo, only the notification of the last message having been read.

*

March rolls into April, the wind stays cold, but the days get longer. Spring envelopes the campus like a comfort blanket, flowers in bloom and bees buzzing around their pistils. Rain tapers on rooftops and creates mirrors on the ground for the sun to look into. The world has exploded in colours and smells after the 20th March, and it stays pretty much the same throughout the month. Some ignore this, preoccupied with their own little universe, others whisper _magic_ behind their hands when they look up, pupils small from staring at their phones. They even talk about seeing little blobs of light dancing around the flowers.

 _Bees,_ Kei thinks as he takes another pill for his headache. With the temperatures rising and unrelenting rains, the skin feels tight on his bones, and there are times when he can’t stand even the touch of his bracelet around the ankle.

Spring break comes bearing homework and reports to write, mid-terms to study for, and the first day of vacation finds Kei in his room, pouring over his papers, textbooks scattered on the table, on his bed, the laptop always turned on. He dances between the two any time he needs one piece of information or another, highlighter between his teeth, pen between his fingers.

Sometimes, he finds his books in a different order from how he left them. His OChem textbook is closed and his toxicology one is opened on a page he didn’t reach yet in class. He does not spare them any thought. It’s probably what too much caffeine does to the brain.

Sometimes, the edges of his reality blur like he’s underwater.

Kei doesn’t look at it too hard.

What if he has been reading the wrong books all this time?

What if he needs more than his books to understand the world?

Sometimes, ignorance means safety. He brews another cup of coffee and goes back to work.

The group chat pings with notifications. Kei checks his phone at lunch when he allows himself to take his mind off studying. Tadashi is the only one polite enough to start with a hello before asking him out for a beer. Shouyo usually sends a bunch of memes he finds during his morning web surfing, followed by the same question before his attention span focuses on something else.

On Monday, he sends two rows full of exclamation points and links to an article about how scientists have taught bees to play golf.

**Shouyou [12:13]**

bumblebees!!!!!!!!!!

kei!!!!!!

bumblebees !!!!!!!!!

On Tuesday, he inquires about the reproductive system of fruit flies. Kei quickly sketches a drawing showing how they use the so-called sex-combs for it, and Tobio replies that he has just lost his appetite.

Thursday, Tobio calls him a loser and a shitty friend for always turning them down. Kei sends a smiley face just because he knows it drives his friend up the walls.

At lunch, he also calls his parents, his brother. He listens to his mother explaining which electives he should choose the next year, listens to his brother tell him about his latest patient, a 13 year old girl who’s afraid of needles. His father listens to Kei telling him about his day. His birthday is coming up in June and Kei knows he needs to buy a present but he can only get so many cooking-related items for his father. The lack of originality says something about why he chose science as his degree.

His thumb hovers over his grandma’s contact. Looks at the clock, sees that it’s past midnight in Sendai, and puts the phone down. He'll call her tomorrow.

The days start at eight in the morning and they end at ten at night with a light dinner and an episode from his favourite drama. Friday evening comes, and he’s finished all of his reports and homework, postpones reading three articles for Saturday in favour of taking a break.

He is 37 episodes into his current drama, about to find out what's the deal with coffin town when Shouyou comes crashing like a thunderstorm in his room.

“We’re going out,” he says in lieu of greeting and proceeds to pull clothes from his wardrobe, red hair bouncing around his head.

Kei only manages a weak _what,_ but doesn’t get up from his desk.

“Bonfire on the hill behind the campus, at the edge of the forest,” Shouyou says as he looks carefully at shirts and pants. “People have been talking about it for weeks. Where have you been?”

“Studying.”

Shouyou stops and levels him with _a look_. “Tsukki. Kei. Tsukishima Kei.”

Kei studies him over the rim of his glasses. “Yes. I believe that’s the name my mother bestowed on me at birth.”

“Don’t get smart with me. Put this on.”

A white shirt and a pair of black jeans are pushed into his arms. Kei pictures himself in those clothes and thinks, _I look like a basic bitch._

“You look like a basic bitch.” Shouyou smiles at him, all teeth and gums. “But a hot one. Time is money, chop, chop.”

Kei gets dressed, checks his phone for battery, picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.

“Don’t forget the bracelet,” Shouyou tells him.

Kei ties it around his ankle.

“Don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

Kei goes into the adjacent bathroom and emerges ten minutes later smelling like cologne too.

Fingers on his arm, Shouyou sticks his nose to his neck, smells, and smiles. “Nice.”

“Why do you want to go, anyway?” Kei asks him eventually. When he gets just a hum in reply and a side glance, he changes the question. “Who do you expect to see there?”

Shouyou sprints down the hallway, hollering to hurry up. Kei doesn’t miss the glint in his eyes. He’s suddenly sorry for whoever they are about to meet.

*

The world dims as they get closer to the forest. The campus is well lit, lamp posts at every corner, windows aglow with laptops turned on. But once they leave the last building behind in a buzz of voices and jazz notes traveling down from the top floors, it gets quiet.

It’s quiet in the way only nature knows how to be.

Loud.

Kei allows his mind to wander. Allows it to shut down.

Crickets buzz around them, the air dump and electric. It faintly smells like smoke, like rain, like hyacinths or daffodils. They follow a path up the hill, grass caressing their shoes, leaves rustling around them. Shouyou sings a melody under his breath, his arms sway around him in a silly dance. He often looks over his shoulder at Kei, smiles but only his eyes change shape, mouth hidden by the shoulder of his pink bomber jacket. Red and pink aren’t supposed to go together, but he somehow makes them work.

The world is still.

Still, in the way only nature knows how to be.

Kei hears his heartbeat in his ears, presses a hand against the thin material of his shirt.

The bracelet is tight around his ankle, an anchor. He inhales, deep, smells the sea, the smoke, the wet ground under their feet. Sweat at his temples, in the crook of his elbows. They climb the hill. The world holds its breath.

It’s quiet and still in the way only nature knows how to be.

And then—

Then—

Then, they reach the top of the hill and—

—and the world shifts.

“Woooooo,” screams Shouyou as soon as his eyes land on the scene, and takes to running down where the bonfire is burning, where people are dancing around it, where cups knock against cups and kisses are pressed into sweaty skin.

Too late does Kei realise that Shouyou’s fingers are tight around his wrist and it’s too late to prepare for the wind that lashes at his cheeks. His legs have a mind of their own and they take up running like that was their only option.

“Woooooo,” screams the crowd as they swallow them up.

Loud voices and loud music surrounds them, the beat heady and sensual with the riffs of an electric guitar. Bodies press into bodies and before Kei knows it, before he has time to get away, Tadashi is there and Tobio next to him, and they smile up at him and hug him, and there is easiness in their affection, the assurance of having their gestures reciprocated because they grew up there. But Kei didn’t, so he pats them awkwardly on their shoulders. He’ll always be the other kid, the other boy, the other person.

Their smiles only get larger and they bump shoulders and press against Kei’s personal space and his heart settles.

Tobio presses shot glasses in their hands, the liquid neon blue and cold. It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be ingested, but Shouyou plasters himself to Kei’s side, throws a hand around his shoulders.

“Bottoms up,” he sing-songs and downs it.

Kei follows through and it burns with an artificial taste all the way down to his toes. He looks around himself, takes in the fairy lights hung on the cars parked to the side, the plastic tables covered in bottles, the empty chairs on the sidelines. It smells like bubblegum and marshmallows, like beer and vodka and oranges. His head is clear, but he feels strange, removed from what is happening around him. Trees are looming in the background, darkness between the trunks blacker than the ink. Impenetrable. A chill travels up his spine.

“Is it even safe this close to the forest?”

Tobio snorts as he lights up his cigarette. Shouyou, who somehow acquired two red solo cups brimming with alcohol, shrugs, and hands him one. “There’s no way the fire will get to the forest, don’t worry.”

Kei realises he wasn’t worried about the fire. He takes a gulp of his drink—cranberry vodka—and winces at the lack of juice in it.

Shouyou laughs around his cup. “Stop thinking so much. Finish that and let’s go dancing.”

Kei takes another gulp. And another one. If he is here he might as well have fun. Tadashi cheers him on, fist-pumping the air until Tanaka shows up at his side and pulls him into the crowd. Kei is almost vibrating out of his skin by the time his cup is empty and Shouyou laughs again. Grabs his hand and follows after their friends.

The song changes, the beat stays the same and the light coming from the fire washes the night in hues of orange and reds and yellows. The smoke looks like it was painted in watercolours. It’s hotter closer to the burning logs, the atmosphere sizzling with emotions, with unsaid things. The shadows are blue and violet and they bleed the moment someone raises a hand or turns their back. The fire is a halo around their heads.

Shouyou’s hands are heavy on his shoulders, his feet swift on the ground and he is laughing, his head thrown back as he looks up at the sky, eager to catch a cooling breeze. Someone bumps into them and sends him into Kei’s chest, and he stays there, head on his shoulder, nose cold against his neck. Tobio is dancing a few feet away with someone whose name might be Kunimi but Kei doesn’t remember, doesn’t care.

He lets himself dance in a way he only allows himself to when he is on a verge of being drunk.

“Are you having fun?” Shouyou asks because he is like that. Pays attention even when his eyes try to take in the world around them. He didn’t even let him get out of his room without having his bracelet on.

Kei spins them around and smiles when Shouyou hides a giggle into his shirt. The vodka spins his brain and he has to stop and steady himself, breathes in air and smoke and spicy smells.

They drink more, and this time it’s not blue shots, but honey-coloured ones and chocolate and dark red. The last one tastes like cherries and it’s so sweet Kei would not mind drinking this for the rest of his life.

He dances some more, sometimes with Shouyou, sometimes alone. He closes his eyes and he doesn’t analyze too much what his body is doing. He breathes.

The fire sways too and the shadows move around them on their own volition, but Kei—Kei averts his eyes before he notices that they are shaped like humans.

He opens his eyes. Looks for Shouyou in the sea of people, but instead, he sees—

Kei heart is small, small, small.

Kuroo Tetsurou is standing at the edge of the crowd, and his sequin jacket is on fire. His body is relaxed, lines drawn in contrapposto, hands in his pockets. Kuroo is talking to some other boy, head bent toward each other, and when he laughs, the colours of his jacket reflect in his smile, in his earrings. For a second, Kei smells hydrangeas. His heart gives a painful thump in his chest.

Kuroo does not look at Kei.

Shouyou shows up, a steady presence at his side, and doesn’t move either. He is watching the same scene, but his eyes are not on Kuroo.

“What is he doing here? He doesn’t go here.” Kei’s voice sounds high and panicked and outraged even to his own ears and when he takes a look at Shouyou, Kei can tell he isn’t the only one who thinks that.

“He has friends here,” Shouyou says. “But I do not know _that_ friend. Seen photos of him though.”

His finger points at the person next to Kuroo. Bleached hair, dark undercut, bangs swept to the side. He smiles lazily at Kuroo, but his eyes are sharp as they look around them.

Kei realises that he is going to pity that person very soon. Shouyou is a force to be reckoned with.

“Do they always tattoo flowers on them?”

Kei frowns over the edge of his cup and adjusts his glasses.

“His arms,” Shouyou supplies.

Oh. Kei sees it now. The boy has his sleeves rolled up, bare arms in plain sight. Tiny flowers cover every inch of his skin up to the tendons of his wrist. They light up as he moves them around, gesturing and talking at the same time. Kei recognizes narcissus flowers among the others, drawn in thin lines between leaves coloured in black.

“It’s a free world,” Kei shrugs and does not look at Kuroo to see if his flowers are visible. “Anyone can do whatever they want to their skin.”

“You know what I mean,” Shouyou smiles.

Kei smiles too. “I am certain I do not know.”

“Well, isn’t Kuroo a—”

“Hinata, Tsukki!”

They both turn where Sugawara is waving at them, curls bouncing around his face. “Beer pong,” he hollers and points to a place behind him. Tobio is leaning against a truck, Kunimi between his legs. Tadashi talks to Yachi and Nishinoya as he fills the cups with beer.

“I do hope those cups are not full,” Shouyou says, eyeing the empty bottles of soju underneath the table, but he is smiling and he sprints over. Pink and red shouldn’t go together, but he makes them work.

Kei follows too, does not look over his shoulder to see if Kuroo’s flowers are visible.

*

They play three rounds.

Beer pong becomes boring once everyone is wasted, and Kei doesn’t wait too long before he taps out. Tobio is riled up enough from his share of losses and he is barely held back by Tadashi and Kunimi as Kei slithers away with a wave and a wink. It is not his fault that his aim is better than his friend’s.

The party hasn’t reached its peak yet, but the bonfire did. It’s half its original height now, people too preoccupied to maintain it. Kei keeps his eyes on the fire as he wanders around, feeding the pleasant haze in his veins with constant intake of alcohol, and avoiding bumping into people. The flames dance in the night breeze, licking the underside of the logs, shadows bleeding red and yellow and orange on the ash around it. Fireflies jump in and out of the grass blades where the red hues turn into dark blues.

Sometimes, the fireflies stop when Kei is near them, as if they are looking up at him.

Kei’s fingers are sticky and his shoes have a red spot on them. Must be wine. He flicks one of the round globes from a string of fairy lights as he settles against a car, and a moth dances angrily away. The light coming from them is white and when he touches one globe, at first with a finger, and then with his palm, heat sips through his skin. He keeps his hand like that, until it becomes too much, and when he lets his fingers uncurl from around it, the light is green.

Kei blinks. Covers the light again. Uncovers it.

The light is blue.

When he looks up, every single globe is red.

Kei presses the pad of his fingers to his eyes, hard enough that stars burst behind his eyelids. When he blinks them open, the light shines white again.

“What the fuck?” he says to himself and then giggles. He is giddy with elation, touches the globes again, but their colour doesn’t change.

He drowns the rest of his lukewarm beer to wash away the disappointment and grabs another bottle, uncaps it on the edge of the table. He goes where the fire is, looking for his friends in an absent-minded sort of way. He doesn’t question when silhouettes double, triple in front of his eyes. He doesn’t swat at the fireflies touching his cheek in a gentle kiss that feels very much like tiny lips pressed to his skin. He doesn’t shred the leaves curling around his fingers in a gentle caress.

Anything could happen in the dark and Kei is drunk.

The air around the fire is comfortable enough to stay, warm enough to fall asleep, and Kei feels the warmth trickle in his bones. His muscles relax and he stretches his empty hand toward the flames, wiggles his fingers as his skin gets covered in goosebumps from the difference in the temperature. The fire looks like it waves back at him and Kei’s smile is unsteady as he takes another sip from his beer. He pushes his hand closer, palm facing up, fingers relaxed. The fire stretches toward him in gentle licks of flame, a hologram of colours. A tiny tendril—does it look like a tiny hand?—touches Kei’s index finger. Shock spikes down his spine and pools in the pit of his stomach.

Kei pushes his hand closer.

The little tendrils travel up his finger and circle his wrist.

Kei’s eyes are big and round with excitement as they follow the fire from behind his glasses. He feels removed from the scene as he watches it travel up his arm, licking at his skin. It doesn’t feel like it’s happening to him, but the hair on his arm sizzles a little where the fire touches him.

And then someone bumps into him from behind and Kei loses focus.

Reality comes crashing down on him, his excitement turns bitter and before he realises what he’s doing, he throws the bottle into the fire. It creates a tiny explosion that bursts into sparks, angry and resentful, just like he feels.

It’s almost one in the morning. Kei grabs a bottle of water from the nearby table as he looks for Shouyou. It’s almost one in the morning, time has slipped between his fingers and he has studying to do tomorrow.

First, he spots the pink jacket.

Second, he notices Shouyou’s red hair.

He blames it on the alcohol that he doesn’t notice the third thing.

“Come meet my new friend,” Shouyou says as soon as he sees Kei, and drags him until they are shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.

“Kei Tsukishima, this is Atsumu Miya.”

Kei nods his head and mutters a quiet hello. Miya Atsumu levels him with a sharp, clear look. It makes Kei fidget, but he digs his heels into the ground and doesn’t move a muscle. He sets his jaw and looks back.

“Nice to finally meet ya, Kei Tsukishima. I’ve heard a lot about ya.”

Kei’s brow twitches.

Shouyou laughs. “Of course. Your friend is Kuroo after all.”

“That he is.”

Kei bristles. “Kuroo has a lot of _friends._ ”

Miya Atsumu smiles. “Aww, are ya not gettin’ the attention ya want?”

Shouyou puts a hand on Kei’s arm. It prompts him to inhale and exhale, and he says, “I’m leaving. I have work to do tomorrow.”

“Aww, so soon?”

It’s not Shouyou who asks. It’s Kuroo, materialized at his side like an apparition. He saunters into their small circle with a girl under his arm and a lollipop in the corner of his lips.

“Hello, kids,” he says and looks at each of them in turn. When his eyes land on Kei, Kei looks away. “Ryujin, meet my friends. Friends, meet Ryujin. She’s an exchange student from Seoul. Such a lovely thing,” he says as he taps her chin with the back of his hand.

She smiles back up at him. She is lovely, in a way girls are, small and lithe and covered in existential glitter. There is nothing special about her, not in the way her hair is tucked behind her ear, not in the way her black overalls stop above her knees. But she fits right under Kuroo’s arm like a piece of a puzzle, and strands of her hair are stuck in the purple-green-blue sequins from Kuroo’s jacket. It’s slipping off his shoulder, uncovering a patch of skin, a tiny chrysanthemum flower.

Kei’s hands itch. He wants to scream and possibly hit something.

Shouyou takes a step forward just as Kuroo leans in. “I might be a bit in love,” he whispers and then he laughs when Ryujin slaps him in the chest, silver bracelets dangling around her wrist.

Her voice is spiced honey when she says, “You just like to own pretty things.”

Kuroo, the devil he is, tips his chin up and grins. “Don’t you like pretty things, Ryujin?”

“I like you,” she replies, smooth and deliberate.

“I am, indeed, very pretty.”

Miya Atsumu rolls his eyes.

Shouyou laughs, but he presses into Kei’s arm.

Kei really, really wants to hit something.

“So what are you three up to this fine lovely night?”

“I was just saying how much I love Atsumu’s tattoos,” Shouyou says. His step in front of Kei as he approaches the other boy. “Is it like mandatory, or—”

“They used to be,” Miya Atsumu replies, “but now it’s mostly for aesthetics. We like havin’ all eyes on us,” he adds and he is looking straight at Kei.

Shouyou hums. “Can I touch it?” and then proceeds to do just that.

Kei knows what touch does to their flowers. Sees it in the way Miya Atsumu becomes very still as Shouyou traces the petals with his forefinger.

“What are the smaller ones called?” he asks and Miya Atsumu takes a second before he replies, “Marigolds. October birth flower.”

Shouyou smiles, small and predatory. “Oooh, so you’re an autumn child, then, Atsumu?”

Kuroo is looking straight at him.

Kei decides then that he is done. “I’m leaving,” he says, voice rough like sandpaper. He spins on his heels and speeds up before anyone can stop him.

The bonfire is a dot in the distance and his breath is erratic by the time he reaches up the hill. It’s still. Quiet. His mind turns and turns and turns. He wants to close his eyes, to calm down, but he is afraid, oh, so afraid of what he’ll find if he does that. Chrysanthemum flowers. The ocean, the taste of it on his lips. The forest, an illustration from children’s books. Wet blades of grass stick to his ankles, imploring, asking. Fireflies dance around his arms, soothing. Crickets jump in and out of bushes, cry under the moonlight. Goosebumps rise on the back of his neck and Kei knows it’s not from the night chill.

His mother would not like this.

He keeps on walking, doesn’t look back until he is past the gate and into the campus. His heart is on fire and his fingers tingle, but there is artificial light all around him, shadows small and curled around the corners.

The world looks dead, and Kei prefers it that way.

The next breath comes easier and it does not feel like his lungs are being ripped out. His shoulders slump and he walks slower to his room, one foot in front of the other. There are fewer windows lit up now, less music flowing down. It’s quiet in the way the world is when all the electronic buzz covers the hum of nature.

Kei ducks under an archway and steps carefully beside a crack in the pavement.

The dorm is five minutes away. Another ten minutes to get ready for bed. Six hours should be enough to get his brain working tomorrow morning.

He presses the bottle to his lips to stifle a yawn, to settle the fire simmering under his skin.

It’s not until a cat meows in front of him that he realizes he has stopped moving. One more second and he would have fallen asleep. He peels his eyes open with difficulty, feels nausea built up in his throat, and looks for the cat. Rubs his eyes when he can’t find it, but maybe it's just the alcohol doing its number on his body, numbing his senses.

The cat meows again.

Kei vision’s focuses and at first, he notices the eyes, glinting yellow and staring right at him. It’s standing on the patch of grass to his left, small and lean, tail curling in the air, before it walks right in front of him, paws soundless on the pavement.

Kei frowns.

The cat stops and sits down, but doesn’t break eye contact.

The skin pulls at his forehead and Kei doesn’t understand what is wrong until he does.

His lungs stop working.

The black cat blinks languidly at Kei.

Kei doesn’t move. The cat is in front of him, an immovable object, and Kei doesn’t want to move either, afraid to disturb the universe. He looks to his left, he looks to his right. The cat stays where it is, its eyes on him. Kei listens. He is alone. He is safe. He takes three measured steps back and then one to the left, out of the cat’s way.

The cat stares at him.

Kei walks around it, eyes on the ground, heart small in his chest. Before he closes the door behind him, a single meow rings in the night, desperate and ominous.

Kei sleeps with his headphones on that night.

*

It is to no one’s surprise that Kei doesn’t do any reading on Saturday.

He wakes up dehydrated, sour in four different places, one being the back of his knees, and with a headache that threatens to liquefy his brain. The sun leaks weakly through the clouds and Kei stares at his ceiling, at the shadows coming from the trees just outside the window. Are they human-shaped? But Kei focuses on the light bulb, ignoring his headache, ignoring the world.

He is unable to go to sleep, unable to get out of bed.

Memories of last night feel like bruises on his skin. He presses at them and they come back to him like a poorly edited film, transition abrupt and violent between each scene. Hands around his neck. Laughter in his ear. Music, music, music. Smell of sweat and alcohol. A firefly kiss against his cheeks. Flowers. Chrysanthemums. Shouyou’s red hair and pink jacket. A cat black as the night.

Kei feels like he is going to be sick.

He gets out of bed, takes a shower. The water is a cool relief against his clammy skin. He stands under the hot shower until he forgets about himself until he is about to fall asleep with his forehead pressed to the tiles and the smell of hydrangea in his nose.

There is nothing on his mind but coffee. He heads straight for Yaku’s, dressed all in grey and feeling very much like a muddy day of winter. When he veers around the corner, a cat hops in front of him, tails swishing in the air. It’s the same black cat as the one from the night before, but its eyes are silver in the daylight, clear as snow.

Kei freezes. He would glare at it if his face wouldn’t hurt but instead settles for taking three measured steps back. Two days in a row is too much to be just a coincidence.

The cat looks like it’s laughing at him.

Kei blinks and sees that the cat isn’t even looking his way, too preoccupied with cleaning its paws.

Coffee forgotten, Kei goes back to his room, hides under the blanket, and stays there until Shouyou drags him out hours later to the taco place just outside the campus. They eat beef tacos with salsa criolla and drink beer, because what’s better than beer when you’re trying to escape a hangover anyway?

*

Classes pick up again and Kei adjusts his schedule accordingly.

His mornings start at six when he opens his windows and brews a pot of coffee. His days end at ten, when he turns off the light, thinks about the next day while trying to fall asleep. The group chat grows noticeably quieter and Tadashi asks him out for tea instead of beer. He goes, because he needs a distraction, and buys coffee, always coffee. Tea reminds him of childhood, the one he left behind before moving away.

The earliest class is at nine in the morning and sometimes he eats lunch with Shouyou or Tobio or Yachi, who returns from the east coast with her hair short and blonde and a girlfriend she calls Shimizu. Her promise involves her moving to California once she graduates next year and because she and Shouyou share the same excitement for life, they start looking over apartments to rent.

“You should definitely rent a two-bedroom apartment,” Shouyou says, leg bouncing up and down as he scrolls on his phone. “Where would we sleep when we come to visit you?”

“On the doormat,” replies Tobio and slaps his tight. “Calm down. You’re annoying.”

But he doesn’t calm down, his eyes focused on his screen and his lips curled in a dangerous smile.

Kei looks at Yachi as he sips his coffee, short, lively, scared Yachi and he asks himself if Shimizu knows about the flowers that exist on the inside of Yachi’s left arm.

*

Kei is very happy with his schedule until he isn’t.

He always leaves his room half an hour before his classes, enjoys the walk, and keeps his pace moderate. His mornings are a quiet hum of birds and butterflies, and then the world slides sideways with the damned cat sauntering in front of him. He takes three steps back and turns away. The cat appears in front of him. Each turn, every turn, the cat is there, so black that it feels like the cat is its own shadow, shifting seamlessly from one street to the next.

Its eyes are golden and unblinking. The cat regards Kei, eerie in its stillness. It makes him want to run, but to do that would be to give in to it; he knows that if he turns his back on the creature, it will give a chase. The predator and the prey. It will bound behind him in a silent hunt, jaws widening and unhinging to swallow him whole.

Kei takes another three steps back. He hurries to his class without looking back. He clenches his jaw against the scream that wants to break him in two.

*

The cat is there when Kei exits his classes in the afternoon, hoping from the concrete flower pot it was perched on, cutting his path.

Tadashi sees it and chases it, cooing at it until the cat lets him pet its fur.

“I think this is a boy,” he says, laughing. “Look at how slender he is. Good boy,” he keeps on saying as he scratches the cat behind his ears. The creature purrs, but its eyes—they always, always stay on Kei.

Kei doesn’t look. He takes three steps back under the excuse that he left something behind and flees the scene.

*

It’s another day of April, humid and horrid in a way only spring knows how to be, and Kei waits in line at the hot dog stall just outside the library. Tiredness pulls at the corners of his eyes and his mind is stretched thin and summer is far away with its promise of naps at the shadows of the walnut trees and watermelon cut in bite sizes.

There’s a couple in front of him and two girls behind him. It smells sweet, like mustard, making his stomach feel heavier with hunger, and his anger sharper because he had to interrupt his studying just for this.

Something curls around his ankles like a soft summer breeze and Kei hums, half a thought away from this place tucked in the corner of the courtyard. It tickles where it touches his skin, it feels like hair, a little wet, a little rough.

Kei freezes and then looks down.

The cat slithers in and out from between his legs, black fur catching on the hems of his pants, and Kei, Kei doesn’t move. His anger triples, accompanied by desperation. He hopes that it will go away, hopefully not crossing his path. There are people around him, people looking at him, waiting for his next move.

The girls giggle and tap his shoulder. “Is it yours?”

Kei looks over his shoulder, answers “No” and then tries to dislodge the animal from around his ankles. “Shoo, you stupid cat. Go away.”

It doesn’t go away. He has to watch where he is going when the line moves, keeps himself very still while he orders. The cat follows him all the way to the library building, walking beside him like a strange familiar. Its eyes are turning yellow with the dusk settling over the campus.

“Fuck off,” Kei mutters as he runs up the stairs. It’s no longer possible to eat outside, and the only option is the small library cafe, with its linoleum floors and neon lighting.

The cat stays on the doorsteps, jaws wide with a yawn, fangs sharp and tongue pink. Kei almost expects to see blood. The last time he takes a look at it, a butterfly settles on one of its ears, wings a brilliant blue. It creates an unnerving image, one that stays with Kei throughout the day, disturbing his focus, frustrating to the point he destroys several good sheets of paper with his furious doodling. He gets reprimanded by the librarian, and that’s a first. They never told him to be quiet before.

He blames it on the cat. It’s all because of that damn cat.

*

After another three days of cat-encounters, three days of taking three steps back and bumping into random things creating random bruising on his body, Kei messages the group. He is tired, distressed, and might be also panicking, which is not a good combination for the amount of work he has to do.

**Kei [17:34]**

There’s a cat stalking me.

**Shouyou [17:35]**

a cat???

where?

is it pretty??

did you pet it?

**Tobio [17:40]**

You’ve been studying way too much if you think that cats stalk people

**Kei [17:40]**

I’m serious.

**Tadashi[17:42]**

Is it the black cat from before?

I haven’t seen it around, though

Maybe it likes you

**Shouyou[17:43]**

oh...

a black cat...

**Kei[17:44]**

Cats don’t like people.

They are cats. They are insufferable.

**Tobio[17:45]**

Aaaah

Tsukki

Are you still scared of black cats?

Did something bad happen lately? Do you feel unlucky?

**Shouyou [17:46]**

tobio, shut up

maybe it’s like tadashi said

maybe the cat likes you

uh, maybe, idk

...

**Tadashi [17:46]**

don’t hit the cat, Tsukki

I know you don’t like black cats

but still...

**Kei [17:47]**

Wtf? I wouldn’t hit a cat or any other living animal.

I just want it to leave me alone.

**Tadashi [17:48]**

It’s a boy. You should give him a name

**Kei [17:48]**

Names are for the things I intend to keep.

I do not want this cat.

**Tobio [17:49]**

What if the cat is the devil waiting for you to strike a deal with it?

You should exorcise it

Maybe it’s a familiar cat and it belongs to a witch

And it wants to curse you

But since you don’t believe in magic

You’ll just deny the curse your whole life

**Kei [17:54]**

Kageyama.

Go fuck yourself.

*

Tobio waits for him after his OChem lab the next day, apology coffee in hand. They drink it outside, on the stone benches under the maple trees, and they don’t talk. Words have never been necessary between them, not when it matters, not now, not when Kei has met the lot of them in middle school for the first time. Shouyou was the one who glued them together, but Tobio was the first one to poke fun at his height. Kei hasn’t looked back since.

They have accepted him as one of their own, even if Kei knows he will never be one of them. Even if Kei knows that there is no place where he can belong.

Fresh out of the only place he has ever known or loved, oceans and roads away from the green of his grandmother’s garden, he kept himself to his corner of a classroom, didn’t talk, scared his accent would be off. Back then, Shouyou was the first one to enter the classroom, loud, so loud. His eyes found Kei immediately.

“Are you our new classmate? Did you just move here from Japan? How is it there? I’ve never visited it. Is Tokyo bigger than New York?”

It was Tobio who stopped him with a hand around his mouth, who pulled him away and lectured him on scaring the new boy. Big attitude for his eleven-year-old body and Kei watched captivated as Shouyou talked back, all bark and no bite. His mother would have never accepted that.

It was Tadashi, shy, and curls covering his eyes, who offered him a place at their lunch table, his desert, and the promise of showing him around town after school.

Another spring, another year, four unruly boys roamed the streets. Here’s the pharmacy. The 7/11. The best bakery in town. The coffee shop that keeps open until midnight. The flower shop. The funeral home.

They walked him to the edge of the forest and beyond. _Wicked things, Tsukki, wicked things,_ Tadashi had whispered with glee. Barely eight hours together and they already had a nickname for him. Kei has told them why his family had to leave Japan. They all laughed at the irony of the situation, because what else could have he done? Cry?

 _Karma,_ Shouyou has shrugged back then and his curls glinted gold in the sun. It would take him two other summers to dye them red.

Too bad his mother didn’t believe in karma.

Two years later, it was Shouyou who found him crying behind the school gym, crouched down next to the dumpster, wet cheeks pressed into his knees. He had forgotten his bracelet at home, a gift from his grandmother, the only thing that reminded him of his lost life. It was then when he understood how powerless he was, how insignificant in the face of the world. The certainty of tomorrow didn’t exist. Control slipped between his fingers. Shouyou brought him a different red bracelet, one he got from a girl in their class, and a day later, he dyed his hair red. He smiled at a flustered Kei and said, “You might lose your bracelet, but you won’t lose me.”

The words have never mattered. Tobio doesn’t look at him, eyes glued to the paper cup in his hands, foot stepping over and over on a crack in the pavement.

Why say sorry for something he had meant to do, anyway?

Kei puts his hand on Tobio’s thigh, ceasing its movement. “It’s bad luck.”

Tobio stops, moves over his foot so it doesn’t touch the crack. He unlocks his phone and shows him an article on how to scare unwanted pests from your property. It is a bit cruel and a bit ridiculous, but Kei reads it nonetheless.

The promise is this: never do the same things twice.

The article is a bit cruel and a bit ridiculous and Kei can’t help the laugh that escapes him. He hands back the phone, says, “Yaku’s coffee is still the best.”

Tobio shrugs and balances his own cup of coffee on his knee. “Debatable.”

“I know you’re money blind because you’re rich,” Kei says as if he’s talking to a toddler, “but that doesn’t mean that every overpriced thing is good too.”

“We should eat the rich,” Tobio laughs as he says it, dropping his voice to imitate Kei.

They don’t need words because they’re never enough.

Kei taps the books next to him once, twice, opens his mouth to speak—

The black cat jumps out of nowhere. It knocks the coffee all over Tobio’s expensive slacks and runs down the paved alley and into the grass.

“Divine retribution,” Kei gasps between fits of laughter.

“Stupid cat,” Tobio calls, disgust written all over his face. “But, Kei, didn’t you say the cat is black? I could swear that cat’s fur was red just now.”

*

The cat’s fur is not red; it’s black.

Kei can see it from where the animal is sleeping on his windowsill, and for the first time in three years, he hates that his room is on the ground floor. The window is closed and there is no way for the animal to hear him enter his room, but its ears twitch as Kei takes three steps back, just in case. How many times has he done this? Thirteen times? Or maybe twenty? _It’s a boy_ , Tadashi has said. Kei doesn’t want to feel responsible for someone else that’s not him, so he is not going to name it. He’s not.

_What if it's a familiar?_

Kei banishes the thought. _Ridiculous._

He taps his finger against the glass. The cat’s ears twitch again, angrier than before, and it blinks sleepy golden eyes up at Kei. Just for a second, they flash with fear, with desperation.

When it moves, back stretching and tail curling in the air, its fur glints red in the sunset light.

*

The night flies by in a frenzy of studying and by morning Kei has bagged two coffees, three hours of sleep, and a complete report for his physics class. Blindly, he reaches for a shirt and pair of pants, doesn’t look in the mirror as he darts out the door ten minutes before class and crashes on a chair one second before his professor saunters in asking for their homework. Kei crosses one thing off the mental to-do list and feels awash with contentment. His mother would be proud.

Later, under the afternoon sun, he sends a question about coffee in the group chat—Yaku opened the small backyard to clients to celebrate the coming of May and Kei could do with a bit of quiet and more caffeine in his blood just about now. Tadashi doesn’t answer and Tobio complains about how he really hates his major and he doesn’t actually really want to build any fancy building.

Shouyou says he’s already having coffee with one Miya Atsumu. The amount of hearts typed after that name is obnoxious.

Kei blinks at the message—his eyes are too dry, too tired, for this kind of weather—and then arrives at the coffee shop exactly seven minutes after he has read it, sweaty and heaving. He sits down on a pillow next to an amused Shouyou and an unimpressed Miya Atsumu.

Yaku raises both his eyebrows when he sees him—Kei will definitely get shit for this later and possibly decaf for a week—and brings him his usual coffee.

“I didn’t know you’ll be joining us,” says Miya Atsumu, smooth and elegant. “When are ya leavin’? We don’t need ya.” When he moves his head, a tiny silver dragonfly looks like it’s climbing up his ear.

Kei looks at him. At his bleached hair, at his blue, long-sleeved shirt that covers his arms, his laid-back demeanor. There’s nothing there and it sets Kei’s teeth on edge. Miya Atsumu senses this and sprawls against his pillow and the brick wall behind him, knees apart, offers himself to the world.

“Satisfied?” he purrs.

Kei splutters in his coffee.

Shouyou giggles and turns to Kei. “You look like you could use a vacation.” His foot is tapping to the music coming from the speakers, a rhythmic reassurance for how jittery and out of sync Kei feels.

He feels like he has forgotten something.

“I could use more time for my next paper. But this school doesn’t believe in eight hours of sleep.” He knows how he sounds—petulant and pathetic, like a child who cries for candies. He would like to feel less like he’s doing daily training for wrestling matches and more like a human being.

“Ya know,” Miya Atsumu says, fingers steady around his blue cup of coffee, “time is easy to fix.” And then he smiles, childlike and innocent, but the sentiment turns predatory in his eyes.

Kei stares at the tree behind Miya Atsumu, at the branch hanging above his head. He imagines it falling on his head. Shouyou kicks his leg under the table and Kei wipes whatever face he was making into something neutral.

“Really? I thought you _didn’t believe_ in physics.”

“Atsumu studied this shit in college, before dropping out like a complete idiot.”

Kei frowns and for a second he thinks —what does he think? That a voice spoke out of nowhere?—when Kuroo sits down next to his friend, puts his head on his arms, and starts making sounds that are better suited for a two-year-old toddler, not a 27-year-old adult.

Miya Atsumu rolls his eyes. “There is better stuff to occupy my time with.”

“Is he okay?” Shouyou asks.

He gets dismissed with a hand wave. “The usual.”

Kei snorts against the edge of his cup. “Attention whore,” he mutters before taking a sip to cover his words. “So? What did you do? Suddenly unleashed the apocalypse when you decided to exit the house today? There’s always the option of never getting out of the house.”

Kuroo turns his head, but Kei can’t actually see any part of his face. It’s covered by a very yellow, very ugly hoodie that he keeps rolled up at the elbows. “Why are you mean to people in suffering?”

“Oh, did you reach your mid-life crisis? Are you going to buy a lot of succulents and give them names?”

Kuroo’s whining gets louder, almost covering the music, but then shuts up as Yaku whips a towel over his back and tells him to be quiet or else.

Or else.

What is Kei missing?

Shouyou stretches against Kei like a cat, warm from the rays of sun filtering through the leaves on their corner of the yard, sweaty and maybe a bit sticky from the dance studio. His shirt is slipping down his collarbones—he knows what he’s doing, he knows—and he looks at Miya Atsumu with big, imploring eyes as he asks, “Is he really okay?”

But Miya Atsumu doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. He averts his eyes and slaps Kuroo on his back. “He just had a little mishap in the bathroom yesterday. That’s all.”

Kei’s eyebrows shoot up. “Really? Did you finally look in the mirror?”

Kuroo kicks him under the table, but Kei doesn’t feel tired anymore. There’s electricity humming in his veins now, lighting up his nerves’ ends, and Kei—Kei wants. He puts his empty mug to the left and leans over the table, dislodging Shouyou from his shoulder. “Kuroo?” he whispers and the boy moves, pushes his nose into his arm.

“Leave me alone. I wanna die.”

“Why?” Kei asks and he pulls his ugly yellow hoodie down.

Red hair spills like blood over Kuroo’s ears, the nape of his neck. His skin flares in the same bright shade of colour. “Just look at it,” he wails without raising his head. “So ugly. I’m so ugly. I should die.”

Kei leans back, crossing his arms over his chest. “For once in my life, I agree with you.”

“It doesn’t look _that_ bad,” says Shouyou as he reaches out to touch his head. He curls a strand around his finger and tugs at it until Kuroo slaps away his hand.

“It looks horrible. How can I go on living like this?”

Miya Atsumu answers at the same time as Kei.

One says, “You should shave it” and the other says, “I have a potion for it, stop whining, ya big baby.”

It’s not difficult to tell who said what, and Kei does not freeze and he does not throw his empty cup at Miya Atsumu’s face, but Shouyou has gone completely still, anticipating Kei’s reaction. But Kei fears for Miya Atsumu’s life. He puts a hand on Shouyou’s arm, squeezes once, twice, until Shouyou’s lips curl at the corners and lift up. The look in his eyes dissipates like ink in water. There is a breath caught in Kei’s chest that comes out as a cough. He needs more coffee.

“You’re not getting more coffee,” says Shouyou. “You need more sleep.”

“You should definitely go to sleep. Like right now. Go, Tsukki, go,” says Kuroo.

Kei hopes he will never get his black hair back. “Shut up, Ariel.”

Miya Atsumu chokes on his drink and Shouyou melts with laughter on Kei’s shoulder once more.

*

Kei doesn’t say much after that. He slumps in his seat, feels his mind going foggy around the edges from the lack of sleep. His head is heavy, his eyes heavier as he looks up at the tree canopy, at the blue, blue sky peeking behind lace-like leaves. His shirt sticks to his back where he leans on his pillow, sticky like a wet paper, and Kei knows the weather will get only worse in the upcoming weeks. He’s lucky his dorm room is facing north, but two months are nothing compared to the summer he will have to spend in his south-facing room back in his hometown. Two months until he has to pack up his life and move again.

Two months until he sees Kuroo everywhere, again.

His mother, too.

He checks his phone for messages from his brother, but there are no notifications to keep him occupied. With the trees surrounding the place and the low brick fence, there is not much campus noise coming in. There are groups of people around them, all occupying seats made out of pallets, all painted in white, but Kei is too far away to hear what they say.

He looks at Kuroo, at his red, red hair. The colour does nothing for its unruliness. Kei gets the sudden urge to touch it and he is too tired, too out of his mind—he is so out of sync lately—and he does just that. It’s soft against his fingers, it reminds him of something. Kei can’t tell. He can’t. He flattens his hand against it, tries to tame it, but strands pop over his knuckles, warm and a little coarse, and there’s the smell of hydrangeas in his nose. Kei’s spine tingles.

Kuroo hums, pushes his head against his palm like a—Kei removes his hand.

Kuroo is looking straight at him. Shadows dance on his cheeks, soft and gold, and he blinks lazily, just like a—

Kuroo pushes himself up, straightens his back, cracks his knuckles. His rings look like tiny, silver snakes on his long fingers. His hair is red, red and it can’t be tamed.

Kei’s heart is stuck in his throat.

“Go sleep, sweetheart,” Kuroo—purrs—for his ears and ears only.

Kei will never be one of _them_. He doesn’t know how to use words as freely as they do. They always get stuck somewhere below his third rib.

Kei goes to sleep and doesn’t blame Shouyou for not noticing, not when his fingers are pressed against Miya Atsumu’s tattoos.

Kei gets to his room and goes to sleep, but not before he undresses. Folds his clothes on his chair, washes his teeth, and opens the window. Pulls the blanket over his head, even though it’s barely five in the afternoon and still hot. Only then does he realise that he has forgotten to tie his red bracelet around his ankle.

*

Kei wakes up to someone pounding on his door. Groggy and pissed and disoriented, he opens the door to Tobio's raised fist.

“What?”

“It’s almost nine.” He pushes past Kei and into his room. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

Nine doesn't seem like an egregious hour for someone who hasn’t slept the nights in the past few days, and he says as much.

Tobio levels him with an unimpressed look. “Nine in the morning. You’ve been sleeping for more than 12 hours.”

“Oh.” Kei frowns at himself and does a quick mental check. He doesn’t feel like he is teetering on the edge of a cliff anymore. His mind is blank save for the sleep that still lingers and his mouth feels awful, but the good kind of awful he gets when he stays in bed longer than three hours. He rolls his shoulder experimentally, and his muscles don’t groan in pain. “Twelve hours.” When he takes a look outside, the blue of the sky doesn’t simmer with heath, but with the kind of sharpness reserved for mornings and mornings only.

“Here,” Tobio says and hands him a cup of coffee.

“Uh, thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” Tobio says and waits for Kei to taste the coffee with a weird kind of look on his face. “It was on your desk. Next to the cat,” he adds and steps aside to reveal the said cat curled on top of his anatomy book, tail under its paws, nose wet and fur alight with morning sun. It doesn’t wake up, not when Kei chokes on his coffee, not when Tobio chokes on his laughter.

“Wait, let me take a photo of your disgusted face.” Tobio actually pulls out his phone, but Kei is faster as he slides into the bathroom and pours the coffee down the drain. He rinses his mouth twice and comes out feeling less murderous.

Tobio is on his chair, one finger going up and down the cat’s spine. Its eyes are open but it doesn’t seem to focus too well.

“Here,” he says and hands Kei a blue post-it.

In Hinata’s handwriting, it says that the coffee is for Kei and he should eat something when he wakes up. Maybe waffles at that cute little place Yachi keeps telling them about.

Kei counts to three and then he drags Tobio out by his shirt and slams the door in his face, blocking out his laughter. With the help of water, he manages to scare the cat into living his room. He closes the window, locks the door, pulls the curtain, and screams into his pillow.

*

The library is one of Kei’s favourite parts of the campus, and when asked, the answer is always the books. It’s what he says to his mother and father, to Akiteru. Tobio and Tadashi think it’s because of how quiet it is. Shelves heavy with books, floor to ceiling, wood tables with generous distance between them, and cushioned chairs. Students can type on their computers or tap their pencils and no one would bat an eyelash. No one would hear. They would if someone would eat a carrot, which did happen at some point and now tiny, elegant posters are pinned up on the notice board, advising students that they should eat their food in the designated areas.

Shouyou is the only one who knows the real reason, and because he knows it, he takes full advantage of it.

Kei looks at his friend, but his friend is looking at Miya Atsumu. They’re tucked away in Kei’s corner, sitting at Kei’s table, books opened between them but no studying is done. Shouyou has his elbows pressing into papers, pencil behind his ear, and face in his hands as he leans forward. The sleeves of his flannel shirt are opened and pooling around his arms. His face is half-hidden in shadows, half aglow with afternoon sun. Shouyou knows what he’s doing and by the look on Miya Atsumu’s face, he’s starting to catch up on it too.

Behind them, behind the painted glass and stone walls, lays the forest. Kei looks at his watch. An hour before sunset. He takes a step forward. Someone curls his fingers around his elbow and pulls him back.

“Chill. Atsumu is not gonna _eat_ him,” Kuroo whispers behind him, sudden and sharp like a heart attack.

Hardcovers muffle any word that is shared in that space. But nothing can protect Kei from his own heartbeat. Kei wonders if the thump-thump-thump of his heart should be a cause of concern for the librarian. Kuroo waves with two fingers at the lady behind her desk as he maneuvers them out of the library.

“Let’s study outside.” They’re going down the stairs and Kuroo’s fingers are still around Kei’s arm. The collar of his is loose enough for his chrysanthemum on his shoulder blades to turn orange in the sun, petals curling inwards, getting ready for the night.

Kei wonders if the sound of his heart disturbs the finches as they sit under the maple tree. They flutter their wings angrily at them but go quiet as Kuroo waves them off. He sprawls on the grass, palms flat to the earth. Kei folds his jacket and sits down on it, pulls his books out.

Kei stares at the formulas on the pages, listens to his heart jumping out of his chest, and gets no studying done.

*

After that, Kuroo is everywhere.

*

For Kei, the beginning of spring means that he can finally switch the puffy winter coat for a thinner parka. His boots turn into sneakers and he stops wearing gloves and scarfs. With the coming of March, he feels less like an onion with multiple layers of cold and misery wrapped around him, and more like a human being who can enter a room without his glasses getting steamed up and rendering him blind.

The ending of spring is a completely different matter. It comes bearing papers and reports to write, midterms, and finals to study for, and books opened at all hours of the day, be it on the desk, on the bed or on the laundry basket in the bathroom. It finds Kei listening to his daily podcast in one ear and reading answers from his biochemistry class as he is trying to get to his morning lab. It’s his mother’s voice in his ear, constantly reminding him that he is expected to get good grades this year.

Something catches his eyes as he turns one card to check the definition of a procedure. A dash of black sprints in front of him and Kei doesn’t need to see what it was to know that he has to take three steps back. A car zooms past him the moment he steps back on the sidewalk.

Kei stops, along with his heart. The vehicle is a dot in the distance, the roaring of the engine making the cards shake in his hands.

The cat licks its fur on the curb of the road, ears twitching and tails swishing in the air. Kei glares and maybe he feels a little bit grateful that the pesky creature has saved his life. Maybe.

*

Yaku’s coffee shop has high windows built-in brass structure, millwork from a different century, and floors made out of white brick. It’s a quaint little place with barely room to turn around. But there are always people sitting at the metallic tables close to the windows, contentment written all over their face as they drink their coffee, eyes glued on the screen of their phones.

Kuroo is one of them, but he is not looking at his phone. He is talking to someone with spiky silver hair, whose body might just be the physical form of laughter. Kei watches them from outside, from the shadow of an oak tree. A squirrel hops on a branch and looks at him quizzically. His fingers curl tight, tight around his credit card, and coffee be damned, but Kei will not step into that place.

Kuroo’s head falls back as he laughs—he usually does that because he knows how good it looks on him; Kei is aware o that— only to bend forward and put his hand on the other guy’s shoulder.

Kei turns around and doesn’t see the end of it. He stops only when he sits down in his own corner of the library, pulls his laptop and his books out, plugs in his headphones, and gets to work.

An hour later, a coffee appears by his shoulder, a hand, an arm, and Kuroo attached to it.

Kei’s stomach does something funny, he presses pause on his music but doesn’t look up. The coffee smells delicious; it smells like a break. Kei doesn’t touch it.

Kuroo sits across from him, folds his arms on the table, and rests his chin on them. His eyes are on Kei and he doesn’t look away.

“I don’t see what’s so special about this place, honestly,” it’s what he says.

And it is enough. It has Kei looking up, mouth turned into a frown, and ready to fight. Too late does he catch the amused curve on Kuroo’s lips.

“Why do you care,” is what Kei asks. He gives in and pulls the cup toward him.

Kuroo shrugs. “You seem pretty attached to it.”

Kei takes a sip out of his coffee. “It’s quiet.”

“It’s quiet over there too, where the two girls are giggling.”

“I like the light here.”

“It’s facing west. It’s melting hot during the day here.”

It is, but Kei doesn’t come here during the day. “How would you know? You don’t—”

“Go here. Yes, I know.” Kuroo leans back, pulls some papers toward him. “I used to when Atsumu was studying here. I had a lot of time to kill.”

It’s the second time he mentions his friend studying something other that it’s not—but Kei doesn’t ask, not even when curiosity is gnawing at him from the inside. He puts his headphones on the table and rolls his shoulders once, twice, feeling the muscles and bones unlock under the skin. The library feels quiet for an ordinary Wednesday right before midterms. The air feels thick with electricity, suspended in tension like a city waiting for a storm. It waits. For what?

Kei slides his eyes over to Kuroo, only to find him already looking.

Does _he_ change every place he steps into?

“Do you want to come to the midsummer festival?” is what Kuroo asks. A whisper of a wish.

His eyes are speckled with gold, his hair no longer red. Hydrangeas claw their way up on his back, peeking at him from under the hem of the shirt.

Kei inhales and focuses on the smell of old books. “No.”

“Awww, you’re playing hard to get?”

“No, I am hard to get.”

Kuroo chokes on a laugh, mouth pressed to the back of his hand. Kei gets back to his studying, but his heart swells with pride at having made Kuroo smile like that. He decides he will allow himself that.

*

“Tsukki.”

Kei doesn’t know for how long they sit there. The only thing he is aware of is the approaching sunset and he has mixed feelings about it. He makes noncommittal noise to let Kuroo know that he is listening.

“Kei.”

Kei looks up, heart behind his teeth.

“Would you miss me if I went away?” Kuroo laughs, but it’s not his usual laugh. It’s a bit strangled as if the words don’t sound the way he wanted them to.

Kei squints at him, before answering with a short, “No.”

“Aww, Tsukki, you wound me.”

“You’ll be the one bleeding if you don’t stop bothering me.”

It gets quiet, and then Kuroo speaks again. His voice still sounds weird. “How do you even understand what you’ve written there?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You write like a doctor. It’s ugly. What if you write the recipe for a miracle drug, but because of your chicken scrawl they create a deadly poison?” Kuroo looks so pleased with his stupid joke that Kei splutters. And then Kei picks his binders and hits him across the head.

*

It is to no one’s wonder that they get thrown out of the library before the sun lights the forest on fire. Kei’s forest. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to feel offended or grateful.

*

The cat follows Kei to the dorm. But first, it jumps in front of him and it makes him take three steps back, tripping over his legs and dropping his backpack next to a puddle. Kei presses a hand to his chest.

Now the cat sits on the windowsill of his room and it watches him as he makes the mandatory calls to his family. He talks to his mother, to his father. Akiteru still doesn’t know if he can come home in June.

Only his grandma is left. It’s almost eight in the morning there, she should be awake. He imagines pressing her number and listening for the call to connect, her tiny voice like sparkling water on the other end of the line. She would be happy, he knows that. She would offer him the answers he needs. _Why is a black cat following me? I don’t think the gift from you is working anymore._

The cat mews bumps its wet nose against the glass.

Kei looks up. He locks the phone and sits down at his desk.

“Go away. Leave me alone.”

Cats shouldn’t be expressive, but this one looks like it’s disappointed in him.

Kei doesn’t call his grandma.

*

It’s the cat who wakes him up the next day. It meows and it scratches at the window, at the wood frame until Kei lifts his head and hisses back at it. His face feels itchy, dried drool on the side of his mouth. His neck stiff from sleeping the whole night at his desk. There is no direct sun glaring at him this early in the morning, but there is a light that makes his eyes water.

And there is a cat which continues to meow, asking for things he does not understand.

Kei looks at his watch. Ice floods his veins as he realizes he is going to be late for his statistics class. He grabs his bag, grabs his pen, his glasses, and barely remembers to put on shoes. When he looks behind him, the windowsill is empty. Kei locks the room behind him and starts running.

*

Two lectures, one argument with his mother— _you have your brother’s example, why can’t you be more like him?_ —and a raging headache later, Kei is accosted by Shouyou the moment he exits the toilet on the second floor of the science building. The plan was to go straight to the library, check out the anatomy books he needs and lock up in his room to meditate himself into not fainting at the sight of blood.

But Shouyou is there, loops his arms through Kei’s, and steers them away on a different path.

“Where are you taking me?”

“We’re gonna eat outside. It’s so warm, it smells like summer. I cannot wait for school to be over and go back home.”

Kei feels like a ragdoll, worn and tearing at the edges, floating on the tiled floors like a lost balloon. He does not care about food, he wants to study, he needs a perfect score on this test. But Shouyou walks faster and faster, unrelenting.

“Ridiculous,” he mutters. He does not think about going back home.

Shouyou turns his head, tiny braids flying around his face. Smiles, eyes hiding in the folds of his face, because he knows he can get away with everything.

The weather outside is becoming painful and the sweat on the back of his neck only makes his headache worse. He feels like a wilted flower and no amount of sun is going to make him feel more than whatever he is feeling right now. Two months and he will have to go back home. He complains just to fill the silence and cover the static noise in his ears. Two months. He does _not_ want to go back home.

Shouyou takes them to a little patch of grass hidden in the shadows of three old oaks, next to one of the newest additions to the campus. Modern labs with modern equipment hidden behind steel and glass. The best for the med students, the future of the country. The best for him too, if only. If only.

_Why can’t you be more like him?_

In the shadow tapestry of the leaves, Miya Atsumu and Kuroo Tetsurou are waiting for them. Kei’s knees lock up, but Shouyou still has his arm around him and walks them to the tiny impromptu picnic with the strength typical for a dancer—which he is, damn him.

Shouyou sits down next to Miya Atsumu against the tree and pulls one of the bags toward them. There is nothing special about Miya Atsumu’s black clothes and his infuriatingly polite face, but Shouyou is radiant as he takes his hand and kisses the flower closer to his wrist, and—Miya Atsumu blushes, angry and confused and doesn’t know what to do with himself. When did that happen? Kei goes a little cross-eyes and does not sit down. Kuroo pulls at the hem of his pants, and Kei shakes his leg, takes a step back. Shouyou notices this, leans over and hits him in the back of his knees and Kei almost falls on his face.

“What the fuck?”

Miya Atsumu looks down his nose at Kei. “And here I thought ya have a stick so far up yer ass ya can’t possibly sit down. Apparently, ya don’t have a spine at all. Huh.” Kei fumes. His eyes slide to Shouyou, expecting the help he usually gets when someone laughs at him. He gets none. Shouyou is smiling as he takes a bite out of a very green wrap. Probably spinach, probably very healthy, because he is a dancer.

“Sit down and eat,” he says as he chews, leaning into Miya Atsumu’s shoulder. “Stop being stubborn for a second and relax.”

Kuroo’s laugh surrounds them like an explosion. Kei looks up and for a moment, a single moment, forgets the betrayal curling in his stomach. There he is, the bastard, sprawled on his back, arms wide, looking like all the tiny blue flowers of the world have crawled on his shirt and bloomed there. The wind disrupts their orderly pattern, shows skin and bones, and black leaves painted in dots across the ribs.

“Come on, Tsukki”, Kuroo says looking at him upside-down. “Let’s enjoy the nice weather. We might be dead by tomorrow for all we know.”

Kei swallows. Straightens his back and sits feet apart from them. Shouyou shoves a plate in his face, with the same green wrap on it.

“It has chicken and mayo and onions,” Shouyou says when he sees Kei making a face. “Now, eat.”

Kei eats. They talk and Kei doesn’t feel like talking, not with them there, not with Kuroo in front of him looking like a garden, smelling like one. He picks at his food and his brain repeats whatever he is hearing, small talk about tv shows, Shouyou’s latest routine, and how he is thinking to go for ballet for his classic dance final. Kuroo laughs at Miya Atsumu’s face when he realizes he’s going to see Shouyou in leggings and Kei tunes them out.

All of this feels like a joke.

Kuroo wasn’t supposed to stay in Kei’s life after that night in his first year of college, but here he is, two years later, warping the universe after himself.

Damn him.

Kei tunes his thoughts out. He finishes his food and puts the plate next to his leg. It takes everything he has to stay put, to not jump up and run around the library like a mad man. His sanity is slipping between his fingers. Kuroo is a foot to his right, leaning back on his palms as he smiles his lopsided smile and looks at his friends from under his fringe.

Kei tunes him out.

He listens to the wind rustling the leaves, focuses on the blades of grass between his fingers, on the cold texture of the ground against his palms. He stretches his legs and his knees relax automatically. A trip to the mountain sounds the right thing to do in weather like this and Kei makes a mental note of asking his brother about their annual trip in August.

Fingers wrap around his bare ankle and Kei tunes back in. Focuses on that point of contact, lets the electricity unfold in his bloodstream.

“I see you’re not wearing your bracelet today.”

Fingers around his ankle. Another mark on his flesh, another memory Kei most likely won’t be able to erase. Another wrong turn on the road to unlearning him. Kei breathes in and looks Kuroo in the eyes.

“What are you talking about?”

He shakes his leg as if he’s trying to get rid of a pesky fly, but Kuroo’s fingers are firm and solid and there. Always there. His thumb swipes over the protruding bone and it’s so easy to press harder into it, to make it hurt. The touch flares up Kei’s every single vertebra, one by one as if someone was playing piano on his back.

“Your red bracelet,” answers Kuroo.

Kei did not realise he wasn’t wearing the bracelet. No wonder the day took a turn for worse. Lack of sleep catches up to him, and he makes mistakes he avoided so well in the past. When was the last time Shouyou asked him if he had the bracelet on him?

“How do you know that?” he asks. No one knows about his bracelet except for Shouyou. “Did Shouyou—”

“You were wearing it when we met at that party. First-year, remember?”

How could Kei forget? He hates himself for it. First-year Kei was so sure of his place in the world. There he was, a freshman, barely out of high school, ready to conquer the world through chemistry and physics. Back straight, eyes in front of him, his friends by his side. What could possibly happen to derail him from his path, to make him, and his mother, in turn, question his purpose?

An invitation. A party. A boy in a black turtleneck. Hands against hands pressed into pillows, eyes golden in the moonlight.

Kei has been trying to unlearn Kuroo ever since.

“Ah,” he says as if they’re talking about a traffic jam. “I forgot.”

Kuroo narrows his eyes at him. “Did you really?’

Two years ago, Kei was the first one to wake up, the smell of flowers all around them. He looked at the beautiful boy in the bed next to him, at the black flowers blooming on his back with the first rays of sun, and the world shifted on its axis, never to be the same.

Later, in class, the professor told them.

“Did you know the pigment of hydrangeas is a pH indicator? If they’re pink, the soil they grow in is acidic. If they’re blue, it’s alkaline.” She showed them two photos of said flowers, and Kei thought, _ah, hydrangeas._

Kei shrugs. “No use remembering something that’s not important.” He twists his fingers in his lap, hiding their trembling. How could he forget his bracelet?

Kuroo scoffs. It’s loud enough to make Miya Atsumu look their way. “Kei,” he says, “you are such a hypocrite.” He shakes his head, and his mouth twists into something ugly, like disgust. “Rest assured, you’ll never be _one of us._ ”

Kei’s heart stops cold. He knows this. He has known that all of his life, and yet—it’s something else to have someone like Kuroo tell him that.

Shouyou does get angry this time. There’s a storm brewing in his eyes, and he pushes himself off the ground, but Kei is faster. He gathers his bag and hands Shouyou his dirty plate to keep him busy. “I need to go to the library. Thanks for the food.” He puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder, squeezes once, twice. “See you later,” he says and he is gone.

Kei does not run, but he is running away. His heart shakes and shakes and shakes and he blames it on not having his bracelet on him.

In his first year of college, there was one world, the one his mother told him about. Rational and logical and simple. Every action had a reaction and the universe was a giant organic chemistry textbook. Kei was content to know that his body was a garden of cells and atoms and he only needed to open a book to understand himself better.

Two years ago, there was nothing else. His childhood was but a distant memory. It happened to another boy on another continent.

Until Kuroo.

He was not a dream. Kei wished him to be.

Kuroo made flowers bloom just by touching them. Objects flew to him from the other corner of the room with just a flick of his fingers and the tattoo was not the same each day. There was no textbook to explain that. Light and electricity danced between Kuroo’s fingers like tiny marbles and Kei. And Kei.

Kei wanted that.

Kei wants.

He has always wanted that.

And he knows he can’t have that. Not now, not ever.

Kei drops the bag on the chair next to him and opens the biology textbook. Does not think about Kuroo’s words— _hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite_ —but instead looks at the diagrams and photos on the pages, wills his stomach to stand still, for just two hours. It’s only blood. Just one exam. It’s not like he is going to be a doctor. The pen shakes in his fingers so he holds it tighter, starts making bullet points of what he needs to know by next week.

His childhood is but a distant memory. The boy he used to be is oceans away, listening to his grandma’s stories about witches and magic and wishing one day he could be _one of them,_ too. Kei does not have the bracelet on him, but it’s okay. It’s okay.

Kei is happy with the world he has access to.

_Hypocrite._

*

Two days later, Kuroo shows up in the library.

Kei gives up studying for the day to stare at the forest beyond the glass. Chin in hand, twirling his pen in the other, his eyes notice the reflection in the window before his brain can put a name to it. It shimmers in the golden haze of the evening, like smoke from a cigarette—eyes without a face, a body without hands—but then the reflection waves his fingers at him, and Kei turns.

“I got you coffee,” says Kuroo. In the dim lights of the library, dressed in a red shirt, he looks soft. The shape of him clashes against the dark brown of the bookcases, the old spines of books, and everything looks like a sepia photograph.

Kuroo looks like a promise, and Kei’s heart is sick with anticipation. It makes him feel small, unsure of his place in the world. The guilt gathered at the corner of his eyes is a stark reminder of why he is there. Kei hates every single of it, so squares his shoulders, tilts his chin up, and makes himself taller. Waits. The library feels strange with Kuroo in it and Kei wants him gone before sunset.

Instead, Kuroo sits down. He pushes the coffee toward Kei and rests his arms on the table, left thumb pressing into the right one, a silver snake ring twisting around his knuckles, looking straight at Kei with its emerald eyes. Kei averts his eyes, swallows.

“Shouyou is a good friend,” Kuroo says, his words tentative. It makes Kei feel a little vindicated that he is not the only one who doesn’t know how to trade the waters they’ve been swimming in since the first year.

“I know.” Kei doesn’t take the coffee.

“He gave me a lot of shit after you left. Atsumu enjoyed it very much.”

“You deserved it.”

Kuroo drags his hand down his face to hide his laugh, but it’s still visible in the wrinkles around his eyes. “That, I did. I did,” he says, shaking his head. “Kei, I’m—”

“Don’t,” Kei says, urgent. “Don’t apologise for something you’ve meant to say all along. Don’t be a hypocrite.” _Like me._

“It wasn’t fair of me. I know you—”

“Most things are not fair,” Kei cuts him off because he really doesn’t want to find out what Kuroo thinks he knows about him. “We have to learn how to deal with them.” And it’s true. Kei grew up sorting between what he could do and what he couldn’t do. After they moved countries and Kei found himself in a strange city, surrounded by strange children who could barely understand his accent, the things he couldn’t do turned into things he wasn’t allowed to do. There was no choice for him. He wants Kuroo to understand this but Kei doesn’t think he is capable of it.

Kuroo grew up with all the choices.

“Not everyone gets the life they deserve or want, so we learn to make do with what we have. We adapt, Tetsurou.”

Kuroo flinches at hearing his name. Kei uses the distraction to grab his coffee, shifts his leg to get rid of the itching sensation in his calf. “Now I have to study.” He doesn’t say what he actually wants to say— _please_ _leave_. It’s clear in the way he looks at his notes as he says it, in the tonality of his voice.

But Kuroo doesn’t leave. He stays, and where Kuroo is, things change.

The building comes alive and it distorts with the long shadows of the evening as they stretch across the hardwood floors. Kei keeps his eyes on his book, underlines random paragraphs to keep his mind busy because he knows that once he looks up, he will have to acknowledge.

The unseemly things.

_The snake climbing up Kuroo’s wrist._

The otherworldly elements.

_The iridescent fae pulling at Kei’s pant leg._

The illogical concepts.

_The magic thrumming in Kuroo’s veins._

The library, with its stone walls and dusty books and brass doorknobs, dissolves like sand all around him. His one anchor in reality, his one answer to his questions. Panic, honey-like and bitter, lodges in Kei’s throat, suffocating him. He closes his eyes, presses his fingers against his eyelids. The library can’t protect him anymore.

The sun cracks against the edge of the forest—his forest—illuminating the campus one last time before night. Kuroo turns his head to watch the world glimmer like an illusion, the little snake is now curling around his ear, settling its head beneath his earlobe. He whispers, “Beautiful.”

Kei does not look. He’s familiar with the sight behind the glass. Evening sky unfolding its wings over the hills, drip, drip dripping blood over the trees. A film playing behind the safety of the screen, Kei in front of it, watching it, enjoying it, knowing that the world can’t reach out to him through the glass and touch him.

It’s what kept him coming back, time and time again.

Kei opens his eyes and kicks the fae off his leg. It stumbles and falls on the ground in an explosion of tiny fireworks, starts chattering its teeth at him, displeased. Kei wants to crush it under the sole of his shoe, but he knows not to mess with nature in the presence of—one of _them;_ one of Kuroo’s.

Kuroo turns his head and smiles at him, enamored with the world. His irises, catch on fire too, molten gold and magma.

Kei can’t look away.

_s u m m e r_

The first week of June brings rain and thunder and Kei stops going to the library. Shouyou asks him about it once, when they cross paths between classes. Kei blames it on the ashen skies, on how wet and suffocating the air feels inside those high rooms. He doesn’t tell his friend how there are little translucent creatures playing hide-and-seek between the books on the shelves, how an iridescent fae has started to cling to his leg after Kuroo breathed life into that place.

Even then, Shouyou doesn’t have time—doesn’t wait—to hear the full explanation. He is always doing something, always bouncing from place to place, always talking to someone. Kei suspects Miya Atsumu, confirms it when Shouyou goes on and on about how excited he is to be helping his boyfriend with some sort of festival at the end of June.

Kuroo becomes a permanent fixture in the time between classes. Whenever Kei drags his feet out on the corridor, arms tight against his backpack as other exhausted students are rushing to be somewhere else, Kuroo is in the courtyard, paper bag in one hand, paper cup in the other. They never say anything to each other. Kei takes the food. Kuroo sits with him until he eats, looking around like a curious child, tapping his fingers on his leg to a silent rhythm.

Kei can’t look at him without remembering the library. It’s always about the times they are together between four walls when something strange happens and Kei makes a silent vow to never be in the same room as him ever again. Outside it’s a different matter altogether. There are people milling about and Kuroo is in his element, shoulders relaxed, chin tilted up as he lets the warm breeze caress his face. Outside, Kuroo’s magic has space to expand, to disperse between leaves and flower beds, and sip in the cracks in the pavement. Inside, it finds a target and crashes against it with all its force. It’s overwhelming like the urge to cry is. It coils around the heart, pushing against the sternum. Suffocating to the point Kei feels the need to let his lips fall open and take big gulps of air. The crying never comes, but the pain lingers in his chest for days.

It tastes very much like longing.

The red bracelet is tight around his ankle, a constant reminder that he is safe, wherever he is, whoever he is with. Each morning, an alarm reminds him to check if he has it on him.

Kei doesn’t want to be with Kuroo in the same place ever again. He wants to stop feeling like an intruder in his own home when Kuroo looks like he will find a home wherever he goes.

Yet, Kuroo is there every day when the skies are calm. Their conversations do not go past the point of pleasantries—they don’t even talk about the weather—and end when Miya Atsumu usually shows up around the corner, flushed and rumpled and his hair sticking in three different directions.

What happens when Shouyou gets tired and Miya Atsumu stops visiting the campus?

Kuroo looks at him then, in the second before he leaves. Leaning back on his hands, his body all long lines and elegant moves as he turns his head and pins Kei to his spot with those golden eyes. There is nothing soft about them but a clarity that chills him to the bone. Where has Kei seen those eyes before? He frowns, swats at his neck as he feels a bee flying too close for comfort and Kuroo leans in.

Kei holds his breath. Does not close his eyes. Kuroo’s fingers brush the side of his neck, the vein pulsing under his skin. The touch sings all the way to Kei’s toes and he doesn’t move. He stares at those golden eyes and the golden eyes stare back.

Distance between them once again and Kuroo is hiding something under his curled fingers.

“Sorry,” he says, but he looks more amused than anything. He lets his hand open and there is a tiny green fairy in the palm of his hand, looking all sorts of upset and offended. “They mean no harm. They just like to bother people.”

Kei splutters, takes his things, and leaves before Miya Atsumu returns from wherever Shouyou took him.

*

Where there is no Kuroo, there’s the cat. It happens on the days when the rain doesn’t let up, when the ground is so wet it turns into a mirror. A whole world thrives under the surface of those puddles, and once Kei made the mistake to pay attention only to notice fishtails covered in bright purple scale swimming out of view.

The cat must have sensed his distress because it meows louder than before, insistent like nails scratching on a blackboard. It drives Kei up the wall, feels like the animal is laughing in his face, so he pulls the curtains close and goes back to his studying. He mentions this offhandedly in his group-chat and it backfires tremendously in his face.

**Tadashi [20:03]**

Tsukki

It’s raining

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

**Kei [20:03]**

Why? I just want to study in peace.

**Tobio [20:05]**

Do you hate that cat that much?

**Kei [20:05]**

I think it’s the other way around.

Why does it keep following me?

**Tadashi [20:06]**

It’s pouring outside, Kei

**Kei [20:07]**

So?

I don’t keep my windows open

**Tobio [20:07]**

Sometimes, you can be really stupid

**Kei [20:07]**

That crown belongs to you, your highness.

**Tadashi [20:09]**

Kei

**Kei [20:10]**

Please stop saying my name and get to the point.

I have to study.

Chop chop.

**Tadashi [20:11]**

I have no idea how you can make even periods sound this menacing

**Tobio [20:11]**

You’re gonna find a dead cat in the morning just because you’re like this

Kei frowns at the message. The meaning of _like this_ is lost on him. Like this how? Alive? Human? With a need for quietness so he can study for his finals? Shouyou is not around to counterattack, and that makes Kei frown harder. When was the last time they had a real conversation and not on the run, between classes, between Kei studying and Shoyou meeting with Miya Atsumu?

And then, Kei’s brain registers the first part of the sentence and he freezes. He lets the phone drop on his desk with a loud _thump_ as he grabs the first towel he finds in his closet, pulls open the curtain, the window, and drags the cat in. It’s the first time he has willingly walked toward the cat, the first time his heart thumped scared in his chest for the cat, not because of it. He has it wrapped like a burrito in his hands in two seconds. It shivers and shivers and shivers. Only the head is peeking out, ears flat against its fur, its wet nose glistening in the yellow light of the room. Its eyes are round, even for a cat, and they look frightened to be there, frightened to be held like that.

The phone vibrates with unread messages. Kei holds up the squirming bundle to his eye level, looks for injuries or blood.

“Happy now?” he asks. “Can you stop meowing at me now?”

The cat’s whiskers twitch once, twice, before stretching its neck out of the towel and licking the tip of Kei’s nose. It feels like a promise.

*

**Shouyou [01:03]**

its june and its warm and the rain is not even that cold

plus, the windowsill is protected by the roof

the kitty was safe!!!!

why are y’all so stupid????

u make me wanna block all of u

*

Kei names the cat a day later. It’s not a thought that actively occupies his mind. He’s thinking about home, summer, his father’s cooking—a comfort he’d like to afford more often. He’s thinking about all the ways he’s changed since he has last been home, at Christmas, and how he will fit back in. For a second, a short, frightening second, he imagines different streets and different houses and no place for him at all but the forest and the place beyond, where Kuroo lives.

He banishes the cursed thought. The key to the front door of his childhood home sits in the top drawer of his wardrobe and he just has to take it when he leaves. He flexes his fingers, stiff from writing and typing for hours, passes a hand over his eyes. He leans back and the chair creaks and groans under his weight as he stretches his arms above his head.

From the corner of his eyes, he spots the cat curled on his backpack, sleeping. Its fur is dry and smooth like silk, and it glows even in the artificial neon light of the room.

“Hey,” he calls.

The cat blinks open one eye, focuses on Kei.

“Should I give you a name?”

He pushes against the floor and the chair rolls all the way to the bed. The cat is watching him now, fully alert and draws on its hind legs as Kei leans over the armest, suddenly there, suddenly very big when its body is very small. He picks it up by its scruff. Its legs dangle in front of his face like a puppet without strings and Kei gently touches one of its pink paws.

“Would you like a name?”

The cat does not reply.

Kei is very amused and he blames it on the late hour, on his tired brain.

“Though you have to promise me not to cross my path ever again. Understood? I’m tired of always taking three steps back.”

The cat meows and stretches, claws popping out of their sockets.

“Cat,” Kei finally says after seconds of contemplation. “Your name is going to be Cat.”

Cat does not look very amused.

*

When Akiteru hears about his misadventures with Cat, he laughs himself into a coughing fit while Kei waits on the other end of the line for his dignity to come back.

“Oh, little brother, you are precious.” Akiteru’s words are fragmented by his shaky breath.

“Fuck off,” Kei replies good-naturedly because admitting he is scared of what comes next is not something he usually does. He opens a new tab on his laptop, types in a random thing just to have something to look at. Akiteru is in the middle of one of his hospital stories, how the husband started singing an opera song inside the delivery room once the baby was born. He takes a small breath, but apparently it’s not small enough because his brother cuts himself off mid-word.

“So,” Kei starts, his voice impossibly weak. He clears his throat and tries again. “Are you coming home for dad’s birthday next week?”

“No,” Akiteru says after a beat too long. His voice sounds tentative as if he is afraid of Kei; for Kei. “I’m working weekends and I can’t really, uh, take days off before August. We’re short on staff. But I’ll see you in August, that’s for sure. I’m not canceling our trip, don’t worry. Speaking of which—”

Akiteru starts rambling and Kei knows he’s doing it for Kei’s sake. His brother’s voice turns into white noise and Kei presses his forehead into the cool surface of the desk as he sets his phone on speaker next to his head. He hears the silent goodbye and the click as the call gets disconnected. Anxiety is hot like burning coals in his stomach, the pain coiling around like a snake around his lungs. It hurts. It hurts. Kei opens his mouth and he can’t breathe. He is going alone at home and he is going to be alone in the house. He—

And then Cat meows loud and startling and Kei jumps in his seat. It pushes against his leg, tail brushing against his calf and Kei picks it up, places it in his lap. It starts kneading at his shorts and Kei focuses on its little paws, on its ears twitching as if they’re listening for Kei’s breathing.

Outside, the sun is setting over the hills, but Kei can’t see it. It hides behind buildings and electrical wires and people smoking on rooftops. The world gets its own halo, pink and blue, and purple. Kei looks at it as it turns to black, making way for will-o'-wisps to come knocking at his windows.

His arms stop shaking and Cat falls asleep in his lap.

*

It’s Wednesday, the sky is gray and the air damp, and Kei exits his last class before finals only to find an empty corridor. He stops just outside the door, takes a step to the left, and presses his back to the brick wall. He tugs and tugs and tugs at his shirt until he realizes what he’s doing. Waiting for Kuroo Tetsurou to show up with his daily coffee. He finds the situation so disgusting that he curses while speed-walking into the courtyard and then to his room.

“Tsukki!”

Kei looks up and to his right. Kuroo is on the other side of the road, dressed in a billowy baby blue shirt, rolled at the sleeves, two buttons open around his collarbones. The flowers have curled almost all around his neck and one of them is blooming as he waves his arm at Kei.

“Something came up today,” he yells. “I’ll see you tomorrow!”

There’s another person with him, shorter and dressed all in white, his hair silver and spiked. It’s the same person that was with Kuroo at Yaku’s weeks ago, and Kei doesn’t like how his heart constricts at the thought. He does not look at their linked arms, does not acknowledge the greeting. He makes a show of putting his earphones in and turning his back to Kuroo.

Disappointment is a misplaced feeling considering the situation. There is another different flutter accompanying it, but Kei is very good at ignoring it in favour of being petty. Grown-ups can get their own drink. Yaku gives him an unimpressed look as he prepares Kei’s order and then throws him out of his coffee shop because apparently he is sporting a _bad vibe._

Kei is very good at being petty, so he throws his fresh, hot, delicious coffee into the nearest trash can as if that can personally offend the barista and the universe itself.

He goes to his room and paces between his desk and his bed for a solid fifteen minutes before his brain decides that it’s time to rearrange the contents of his small bookcase and every drawer in his room. Cat is nowhere to be seen, even though its black hair is everywhere. Blankets and pillows pushed to the wall, papers and laptop and books to the edge of the desk, Kei empties the shelves, the drawers, and his backpack on every available surface.

He stares at the mess of colours and textures and sizes until they all blur together and his eyes water. He takes a deep breath, inhales the summer hair and feels his nostrils sticking together with cat hair.

Books and candles and papers with colourful diagrams drawn on them and one photograph with Akiteru. Memories everywhere he looks. They’re both smiling and sweaty under the summer sun, many moons ago when Kei still had toothless gaps in his smile and believed that life is just as easy as 1, 2, 3. Back then, he mistook the emptiness in his stomach for hunger, until he learned a new word, thousand of pages later that his mother made him read. Food did not fill the hole in his stomach. His father was happy to cook for him, but no matter how much he ate—and he did eat, a lot, he was a growing child—the emptiness was getting bigger and bigger each day. He dreamt of being swallowed by it.

What is worse: feeling lonely or feeling like you don’t belong to any place you step into?

Kei leans back against the desk, frame in hand, shifts a little as he feels himself slipping off the edge. The desk shakes and a stack of papers and some pens fall to the floor. Kei looks over his shoulder, assessing the mess and not feeling like he should do something about it. They’re followed by his English textbook and a pencil case. His old power bank slides off some notebooks in its way, it knocks over a tiny oval mirror too.

He does not react. He cannot react. Kei watches the mirror fall in slow motion, static noise in his ears. Seven years of bad luck await him the moment the mirror crashes on the ground.

Kei closes his eyes, does not want to see. He is so tired.

The crash sound doesn’t come. Instead, Cat meows next to his leg.

Kei opens his eyes, looks down at the impossible black thing that crashed landed into his life like a thunder. Blink, and you miss it. Like a shadow, Cat is always there, at the edge of reality.

“You impossible thing,” Kei breathes helplessly. He picks up Cat, curling his hand around its belly. Removes the mirror from its tiny mouth, sets it aside high on a shelf where it’s harder to get it knocked over.

The cat pushes its paw against his cheek as if it's trying to lecture him on his stupidity.

_Do you want seven years of bad luck? How are you so stupid?_

Its meows sound offended and displeased and Kei laughs.

“It’s just a mirror,” he says, but his heart feels so light in his chest. Like a butterfly. Before he can control himself, he presses his lips to the side of Cat’s head, long and hard. The fur tickles his nose. It’s so warm, it warms him up to his toenails.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank you.”

*

The weather unwinds as the world gets accustomed to June and Kei finds himself studying outside more and more. The grass is soft and dry as he lays on it, and there are books all around him, papers with half-written notes, his laptop, his phone. Its proximity to the dance studios makes it that he hears music notes distorted in the wind every now and then. Its proximity to Yaku’s makes it that he’s there every other hour, asking for a coffee like a drug addict. He returns to butterflies and bugs and tiny creatures climbing all over his things. He blows them off and they hide behind blades of grass, watchful.

It’s Cat who makes them go away for good. It snaps its teeth at them, and the gesture reminds Kei so much of a human that he just laughs. He can’t help himself. Cat turns its golden eyes on him, waits.

“Wake me up in 30 minutes,” Kei says and stretches on his back, hand behind his head. “I need a power nap.”

He closes his eyes and falls asleep under the protection of the tree. He feels the shadows moving on his face, around his legs, as if they are trying to pull him under to a world he does not want to go. His breath evens out and Cat is a steady presence at his side, curled against his hip.

Kei dreams. The grass grows, grows, grows, it engulfs him in a blanket of green smell, of flowers and cicadas singing in his ears. It melts into emerald snakes with ruby eyes and they get under his shirt, tightened around his wrists and ankles; but they don’t touch his red bracelet. They melt off of him like wax, cool and soothing like a summer breeze. He dreams of worlds far away, lush green, smelling like flowers. He dreams of red paper lanterns floating in the air.

Kei dreams. Of butterflies with wings made out of crystal, ice-cool as they kiss his eyelids. Poppy topaz eyes as they stare at him from behind leaves, blinking lights getting caught in his hair. Fingers, long and gentle as they smooth out his fringe, press against his eyebrows. A touch. Barely there. A touch—lips, soft and cool as dewdrop—against the skin of his forehead.

Kei dreams.

And then he stops dreaming.

He blinks, opening his eyes to a sea of green above him, to Kuroo’s face peering down at him.

“You should sleep more,” he says as he offers his hand to Kei, helping him up. Hand against hand, skin against skin, Kei quivers with it.

“How long have I been sleeping?”

“An hour or so?”

Kei stops rubbing his eyes to stare at Kuroo. “Were you watching me? Creep.”

Kuroo grins. “Just a hunch.” He wiggles his fingers in Kei’s face. “You know, magic.”

The wind picks up and light presses against their cheeks. Kei feels full of it, of summer, of life. He can’t look away.

“Have you seen a black cat on your way here?” he asks as he pulls closer his laptop, turns it on, and scrolls to the slide he was reading before falling asleep.

“Oh, black cat? A magic black cat?”

Kei looks up, scathing glare at the ready, but he falters when he sees the unsure look on Kuroo’s face, at odds with his words. “Is there something wrong?”

“I didn’t know you had a cat.”

“Not mine. But I can’t get rid of it so I guess I have a cat.”

“What’s his name?”

“Cat.”

Kuroo’s laugh is like bells singing in the wind. “Cat? Do you science students have no imagination?”

“I keep my resources for better things like figuring out the subject for my Bachelor thesis or cure for cancer.”

“Woah, do you do anything else with your time?”

“Yes. I drink coffee and I sleep.”

“Do you sleep in a bed?”

Kei pats the ground behind him. “This is pretty comfortable. I like my mattress hard.”

Kuroo waits for a second, and then says, “That’s what he said.”

God help him, Kei laughs.

“Asshole,” but he doesn’t mean it. “I just love what I’m doing.”

“Exhausted, not exotic, right?”

Kei thinks about his mother. Thinks about his family of doctors, proud and wearing white, stethoscopes around their necks. Akiteru’s tears down his cheeks the moment he graduated. _I’m going to be useful now,_ he has said. _I am going to help so many children, Kei._

Akiteru has become friends with death ever since, but that hasn’t stopped him from calling Kei once a week to tell him how he tricked one of his young patients into swallowing a bitter pill.

Kei imagines his graduation day, diploma in hand, cap on his head, and one single thought on the tip of his tongue: to put as many miles as possible between his home and himself.

_Why aren’t you more like your brother, Kei?_

“I just love it,” he says, settles for the simplest truths of them all.

“Why?”

Kei waits for Kuroo to laugh, to mock him, but it doesn’t come. His life story plays out in front of his eyes, and Kei stretches a hand, plucks a single detail out of it, and says, “My grandma.”

“Your grandma?”

He shrugs. “She loves cooking and herbs and brewing stuff. She’s my maternal grandmother, but she taught my dad how to cook before we left Japan. My mother doesn’t know how to use a knife.”

“Isn’t she a doctor?”

Kei scoffs. “She’s a surgeon.”

“Do you miss it?

“Hm? Miss what?”

Kuroo doesn’t answer right away. He looks at Kei for a second, as if he is afraid to say what’s on his mind. “Japan. Your grandmother. Life there.”

“Life there,” Kei parrots. He is not even sure that his memories from when he was living there, the most vivid, striking ones, are real or tricks of his mind.

“Yeah,” Kuroo says as he scoots closer. “Do you miss speaking Japanese?”

Kei’s first instinct is to shrug, but he takes a second to think about it. Being a strange kid in a strange country sure made him think differently about how language works for one’s personality. English is simple. What he means is what he says. He misses the softness of his own language, the comfort of the dialect spoken at the light of a lamp, late into the night. He misses his grandmother humming to old songs in her kitchen, adding spices to her soup, tasting soy sauce, and wrapping boiled eggs and miso paste. He misses Japan with a heart-wrenching pain that cuts him in half. Half of his heart is in Sendai, between bottles of spices in his grandmother’s kitchen.

“Sometimes. I do speak to my brother in Japanese.” And because he feels loose with summer and the approaching vacation, he says, “I got my red bracelet from her.” He touches it with his pinky finger. “For good luck.”

This time, Kuroo does not touch his leg. “Does it work?

Kei scoffs. “Considering there is a black cat following me, I am not so sure about it.”

“Why are you not there?”

Kei takes a minute to think about it. Plucks another moment from his short, short life, unravels it like a ball of yarn. “My mother. She doesn’t like—” and he gestures to Kuroo because he still doesn’t have the courage to name it.

“Magic?”

Kei nods. “She doesn’t believe in it, even though she grew up with it. With my grandmother’s best friends. With her own godmother. My mother is, uh—it’s complicated.”

“Why?”

“She’s a doctor. If science can’t prove it, then it doesn’t exist. I’m pretty sure there’s more to it.”

Kuroo makes a face. “But I’m real.”

“My mother doesn’t like people like you.”

“But you do.”

Kei looks at Kuroo and sees him for what he is. Beautiful, beyond beautiful, with possibilities sparkling behind his eyes, in the tips of his fingers. Kei resents him for it, for what he is, for how easy he makes it seem. Resents himself for what he didn’t ask to be. He shrugs, because there is no answer he can give

Too late, after Kuro falls asleep next to him after Kei finishes a chapter and then another one, does he realise that it wasn’t a question.

_But you do._

*

On Friday, after one hour and a half on the road, Kei goes back to an empty house.

There is a note waiting for him on the kitchen island, white paper against black stone. Black letters on yellow paper. In his mother's handwriting, strokes so elegant and careful as if she is performing surgery on every word, she tells him there is food in the fridge, leftovers from last night’s dinner. It does not tell him why they will be late, but he suspects. Night shift at the hospital. It ends with her signature, neat and perfect, not a single drop of ink wasted. It starts in English, it ends in English, because the past does not have a place in this house.

Kei reads and rereads the note, but the words make no sense. He opens the fridge, does not register its contents.

Everything smells like disinfectant. Underneath, there is a touch of basil and oregano, lemongrass, and cayenne peppers, too faint to notice if Kei wouldn’t be looking for it. It makes his chest seize up, knowing there is life behind those walls, all thanks to his father’s little vegetable garden. He looks at the white curtains, at the empty shelves save for the occasional photograph. No plates in the sink, no stray cup forgotten on the counter. In the fridge, everything is labeled and placed in glass containers. The same deserted feeling stretches along with the gray floors, to the bathroom, and up the stairs, in Kei’s room. White walls with one single chemistry-related poster carefully placed on the door. In a box, under the bed, his dinosaur toys.

The house is sterile, just like an operating room. Just like his mother. It smells like her.

Kei goes to his room, opens the windows to let the night breeze in. He sets his backpack on the bed, does not sit down because he knows morning will find him there, head in hands, staring at his toes. He goes down to put something in his stomach, to soothe his nerves for the night. Rice and agedashi tofu and grilled fish, diced cucumber in wasabi mayonnaise. He eats only the tofu, washes the empty bowl, and goes back to his room.

Nothing sounds right. Not the crickets. They were supposed to be cicadas. Not the cars, not the people, not their language. Nothing smells right. Too clean, too orderly, as if he is living in a metallic box.

The house—a hospital, his heart—the patient. But he doesn’t get better.

He misses the clutter of his dorm room. The chaos inherent to campus life.

He misses—

Would Kuroo be able to breathe life into this house?

 _They_ do not come to places _they_ are not welcome into.

He misses home. Thousands of miles away, hidden between his grandmother’s herbs and teas and different ceramic pots in colours so vibrant they always made Kei happy when he saw them stacked one upon another, all over the place. He falls asleep thinking about her, chest heavy with nostalgia and regret.

_Take this bracelet, little Kei. It will protect you from harm. It will bring you good luck._

Kei falls asleep and dreams of fields covered in orange chrysanthemum and blue hydrangea, butterflies flying around and around and around, music to his ears, caressing his face with their crystal wings.

*

His father’s birthday is on Sunday, but they celebrate it the day before. His parents have taken Saturday off for the yearly barbeque party, and they have invited everyone they know, co-workers, and friends that live across town or in another city. Most of them doctors. They are dressed in different shades of gray and white, talk about the same issues in different words, and refuse with barely masked disgust when somewhere offers them beer. The house sheds its reclusive clothes to welcome condensed cocktail glasses on the counter, recyclable plates with half-eaten food left on the table by the back door, wine glasses on the tables outside.

It’s loud in a way Kei is not used to it. Artificial and disturbing, it makes his head throb at the temples. He sips at his orange juice, warm and heavy on his tongue, stares longingly at the alcohol passed between adults’ hands. He shoots a message to Shouyou; he needs a distraction, anything, but his friend doesn’t reply.

People ask him if he will become a doctor, following in the steps of his parents and brother. When Kei answers no, they proceed to ask him _why not?_ It’s a process that repeats with every person that stops him with a touch on his arm, and which lingers in an offended grip when he tells them, “I don’t like the sight of blood.”

He entertains the idea of saying that he is training as a magic healer, using energy and plants to make people better. But his mother looks lovely in her blue summer dress, hair short and bleached—a knife wrapped in gift paper—and he does not want to cause her a coronary.

His father smiles at him from afar. _I’m sorry,_ his eyes say before he turns to the next guest to accept their gift. A voucher, probably.

Kei shakes his head and sends back a smile. This day is not about him and his existential crisis. It’s about his father, his cooking, the fact that he is growing gray at the temples. A thing he’ll have to make fun of later when they’re alone and the house becomes quiet again.

He is standing in front of the vegetable garden, rubbing a mint leaf between his fingers when the phone chimes in his pocket.

**Kuroo [16:03]**

I heard about the party

How are you surviving it?

Kei takes a second to reply, letting relief wash over him in waves.

**Kei [16:05]**

I’m trying to offend every doctor here by telling them I hate the sight of blood.

It works amazingly well. They get so red in the face, and they know they can’t yell at me so they just smile. No one wants to make my mother angry.

**Kuroo [16:06]**

She sounds scary. Should I be afraid of her?

Are you keeping count?

**Kei [16:06]**

There’s no need for the two of you to meet.

Seven so far. There are at least 15 here. I wonder how many of them are going to suggest therapy to deal with it.

Oh, to be the black sheep of the family at such a young age.

**Kuroo [16:07]**

Tsukki :(

Don’t say that

There’s one alternative to medicine that you could consider

Kei answers with, “Yeah, pharmacy” and Kuroo with, “You should try your hand at magic.” It’s such an absurd concept that it makes him freeze on the spot and stare at the screen until it goes black.

It’s not even possible.

His parents are simple human beings, his brother is the most boring person he knows, there hasn’t been anyone in his family history to be able to do _it_. Not that he knows of.

How could he, a completely ordinary person, be able to—

Is it even possible?

Kei is sick with the hope unfurling in his stomach, searing hot.

It is _not_ possible.

“Kei?”

His mother touches his arm, gently, with one finger. She is, even more, lovelier up close, like a statue in motion, the light always catching on her sharp cheekbones.

“Can I help you, mother?”

“We need some more cranberry juice out here. It’s in the fridge, on the left. Could you—”

Kei nods and goes inside. He gets out the juice, puts it on the counter before gripping the edge, and inhaling deeply. The phone vibrates in his pocket, but he doesn't have the courage to check it. What will he find? Proposals? Solutions? The idea of possibility scares him. He does not feel ready.

What will his mother say?

He pours himself a glass of water, does not drink it. Keeps his fingers under the cold stream coming from the faucet until his knuckles go numb.

_Is it even possible?_

_It’s not_ , a voice sounds loud and firm in his mind—just like his mother. What is he even thinking about?

But what if—

Kei turns on his heel so quickly that the back of his hand knocks against the glass full of water, against the salt shaker, sending them across the counter. He manages to catch the glass, but not the shaker. It spills everywhere, little white grains of salt sliding off the counter, on the tiles. He doesn’t think about it. Does not process it. His movements are quick as he tosses a pinch of the spilled salt over his left shoulder, hopefully into the devil’s face. A gesture ingrained in his memory by now. Kuroo would laugh at him if he knew, but it grounds Kei into the present, into the house he doesn’t want to be in.

“Kei?”

His mother stands in the doorway, carrying an empty plate. “What are you doing?” She knows what he’s doing. Her sharp eyes don’t miss his distress, narrow with the promise of a talk later into the night. “Bring the juice out. The guests are waiting.”

She puts the tray on the counter, empty and covered in breadcrumbs, and leaves.

Kei cleans the mess, picks up the juice boxes, and follows after her. His hands do not shake as he pours a glass to some woman who tells him that being in the presence of blood gets better with every orpse you see at the morgue. Laughs about it as if it’s a joke.

His hands do not shake, but his heart rattles against his ribcage.

*

They don’t have the conversation that night. Kei keeps an eye on her while they greet their guests when they leave when they clean up the courtyard and the mess inside the kitchen. The conversation doesn’t veer into personal and uncomfortable topics and by the time they say good night, Kei has all but forgotten that he’s supposed to be lectured about his tendency to counterattack the superstitions. About the fact that he believes in them in the first place. When he does remember it though, he can’t sleep until four in the morning.

She waits until she’s driving him to the bus station. The only way to get out of it is for Kei to jump out of a car, break his arm or his leg, get a concussion. The doors are locked, he has the seatbelt on. He is too high strung to move a finger, so he stares resolutely in front of him, at the city unfolding like a ribbon outside their car.

Kei waits.

They stop at a red light. Kei watches the people cross the street, sees what he refused to see before. Insects and creatures stuck in their hair, tattoos peeking from underneath clothes. Flower patterns sewn into their jackets, pouches dangling from their wrist, strange inscriptions sewed into them. He does not look at his mother to understand what she is seeing; _if_ they are seeing the same things.

She speeds up, passes the grocery stores, a flower shop, a barbershop. A man with a blue beard and tattoos all over his calves talks to a priest. They laugh and Kei can’t take his eyes away.

Kei waits.

A group of kids skates down the sidewalk, ice cream in hands. One of them drops it on the pavement, and they all scream in delight. She moves her finger in a perfect circle and the ice cream on the pavement disappears as if it has never been there in the first place.

He does not realise how much he has missed seeing magic exist in the same place as him until he sees it again after two days of being cut off from that world.

How could anything grow in that house?

Kei waits.

His mother doesn’t say anything until she’s pulling into the parking lot and stops the car. Her fingers are long and elegant where they curl around the steering wheel, perfect round nails, and soft cuticles. The hands of a surgeon. She never stopped once to ask herself what to do with her hands. Kei can barely remember where to put his when he is not touching his red bracelet.

She takes a deep breath and turns to face him. “We left Japan for a reason.” Straight to the subject. Kei nods, because he does not have anything else to say. “We came looking for a better life. We found it. And that’s why I do not understand.” A pause. “Is this about your grandmother?”

“I haven’t talked to her since her birthday.” _Since last year,_ it’s what he doesn’t say.

“You have disappointed us once, Kei.”

_How can you be afraid of blood?_

“I hope it won’t happen again.”

_Do not embarrass us again._

Kei nods. He digs his nails into his palms, says, “It’s nothing, mom.”

“Good. You are our son.”

He knows. There is not one day when he does not feel it.

“Don’t let the C in Anatomy repeat itself again.”

_Akiteru would have scored a clean A._

“Of course, mother.”

When she leaves, she doesn’t say goodbye

*

On the bus, Kei finally opens the chat with Kuroo. He does not read the messages sent on Saturday—the solutions, the ideas, the possibilities. Does not reply when asked if he is free for lunch on Tuesday.

**Kuroo [20:13]**

Atsumu is visiting Hinata and I really don’t wanna be third-wheeling

Also

I need to tell you sth...

It’s urgent...

He deletes them all and locks his phone. Puts on his headphones plays his favourite podcast, and does not hear a word over the white, crippling noise ringing in his ears.

*

It gets worse from there.

Kei has an exam on Thursday and he can’t focus. Fear is nothing but an obstacle, one he needs to step over it, to move forward. This time, he can’t. He is restless and tired, bones rattling under his skin, dreams full of teeth and claws ripping at his skin. Holding onto his red bracelet does not help. Talking to his brother does not help. There is an itch under his skin and Kei can’t scratch it.

True to his word, Kuroo visits him on Tuesday. He finds Kei inside his room, at his desk, leg shaking with unrestrained energy, eyes reading the same sentence over and over again.

“What’s up?” Kuroo says as he enters, forgoing knocking and any other social pleasantries. “I’ve brought lunch. And tea.”

Kei’s mind blanks out. He does not think a second more about it. Stands up from his chair and faces Kuroo. Sleep-deprived and a bit out of his mind, he chooses his target and aims. “Tea? You know I do not drink tea.”

“Uh, right. I know. But you should try it, though. Too much coffee is not good for the soul,” Kuroo says. “I mean, you already look like an overcharged battery.”

“And then what?”

Kuroo frowns. “I don’t know what you mean, Tsukki.”

“Are you going to tell me what to eat, too?”

“Kei.” Kuroo’s voice is steady. He puts the food on the table, takes a step closer. “I think you need to take a break from studying?”

“Of course you’d know what’s best for me. You’re the witch, right?” Kei hears the words, he understands what they sound like, but he doesn’t have the power to stop them.

“I am not going to argue with you,” Kuroo says. “Just eat this, drink the tea if you want, and take a nap. You need it.”

“And if I don’t? What are you going to do?”

“Kei—”

“Curse me? Poison my food? Transform me into—into a toad?”

Kuroo does not say anything. His frown deepens, darkens the lovely curve of his mouth. His eyes shine dark gold.

“How do I know you didn’t poison my tea right now?”

“Is this how you think of me?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the weird one here.”

“Weird.”

“Or are you normal? How are you sure you’re even real? That what you have—” and Kei does a gesture with his hand, up and down, pointing at Kuroo “—all these powers? Maybe you’re just deluding yourself. Trying to be all special when there’s nothing special about you.”

“Right,” Kuroo says. His eyes turn gray and dull, his face smoothes over. “Well, Tsukishima, we are going to end the conversation here.”

“Are you not even going to deny it?”

There is no answer. Kuroo turns his back on him and walks out, just like he came in. There is no goodbye for him. There are no smiles for him. Do they think Kei doesn’t deserve any of it?

“Coward,” Kei whispers once the door closes and he is left with silence and only silence.

“Coward,” he says, louder, and kicks the food bag on the floor. It smells like meat and spicy sauce and garlic.

“Coward,” he screams and starts crying.

*

Kei meets up with Shouyou on Thursday, after his exam ends. The evening sky unfurls in stormy clouds, grey and heavy against the faculty rooftops, and Shouyou appears like a ghost, looking taller than he is, hair red red red as he storms toward Kei.

“What were you thinking?” is the first thing he says to Kei after days—weeks—of not hearing from him.

Kei straightens his back, tries to understand where this is coming from. “The correct answers to the exam, I hope.”

Shouyou grabs him by the elbows, shakes him until Kei feels his brain moving around his skull. “Atsumu is upset because Kuroo is upset. And if Kuroo is upset, Atsumu gets all protective. Like a mother hen.”

“Shouldn’t that be your business to deal with?” Kei asks. He is jealous and he does not like it. It consumes it from within, like a fire slowly turning everything into ash.

“Cut the crap, Kei. I need you to apologize to Kuroo. It’s your—”

“No.” It’s that simple. “No way.”

“It is your fault. You shouldn’t have said those stupid—”

“What do you know?” How could he know when Shouyou has not been around lately?

“Kuroo told Atsumu and Atsumu told me. He said we can’t be together if you treat Kuroo like this.”

“And why does he care? It’s not like they are related.”

“Blood does not matter when you are from the same coven.”

Kei scoffs. “Of course. Lucky bastard. Are they born from humans or does a stork bring the baby every now and then and they adopt the child as their own?”

Shouyou takes a step back and pushes his hands deep inside his pockets. Kei knows he would have been hit, but Shouyou has too much self-control for that.

“My birthday is on 21sth, this month,” Shouyou says, looking straight at him.

“I know that,” says Kei warily. “Why are you telling me this?”

“It falls on the day after the Summer Festival starts. The one I’ve been helping Atsumu with. There will be food, drinks, music, a huge fire.” At this, his eyes regain their usual excitement. “I asked everyone to come there on the 20th. I am now asking you to come.” He pauses and then he adds, “You are going to come and you are going to apologise.”

Kei does not sneer, but he feels his lips curl over his teeth. “And if I don’t?”

“I’m not losing this relationship because of you, Kei.”

Kei doesn't say anything. When did Miya Atsumu become more important than him?

“I’m serious,” Shouyou says as he turns to leave. “Get your head out of your ass. Not everything is about you.”

*

Back, in his room, Kei doesn’t know what to do with himself. He stands in the middle of it, confused and angry. He clenches his hands until his nails leave crescent moons bites in his palms until his tendons start quivering.

Cat meows on the windowsill. Kei blinks. The cat jumps on the desk, on the floor, approaches Kei with cautious steps, from the side, because ever since that day, the cat hasn’t crossed his path once. Warmth spreads inside his body and Kei picks up the animal, holds it close to his neck, to feel its tiny heart beating against his. He buries his nose in its fur and—

He breathes.

*

The finals pass in a blur and Kei finds himself waiting for Tadashi to pick him up and go together to the Midsummer Festival. The afternoon is chilly, clear skies and cotton clouds, and by the time they reach the forest, the golden hour will be upon them.

His fight with Shouyou hasn’t lasted more than one week. Kei caved in and asked him about the dress code. Shouyou called him a “giant asshole” and then sent him a white flax shirt the next day. Kei doesn’t open the package until it is too late, until he can’t change his mind and ask for a different piece of clothing. He puts it on and takes it off and puts it on and then Tadashi calls him to tell him he was five minutes away, is he ready?

Kei is not ready

Now, he puts on the white shirt, does not think about the thin material, the embroideries on the lapels, down his front, and around his sleeves, how large it feels on him. Tadashi whistles when he sees him, pulls at one of his drawstrings until Kei slaps his hand away.

“You look handsome, Tsukki,” Tadashi snickers as he starts the car.

“Fuck off.” Kei slumps against the door, tries not to scratch at wherever the shirt touches his skin.

Tadashi turns on the radio, tunes into an evening show with mellow music. He looks amazing too, dressed in a simple white shirt and cotton white pants, hair pulled back in an unruly bun. Summer makes his freckles pop out, and they distort and stretch across his skin with each smile. “Are you excited? Shouyou sent some pics earlier today. The place looks amazing.”

Kei has been afraid to look at those photos. “Not really. I just want to be done with this.”

“Come on, don’t be a party pooper. It’s going to be fun.”

“You can be an optimist for both of us. I’m just going to be tired.”

Laughter fills the car and they don’t say another word for the duration of the drive. It’s not that Kei has something against Tadashi. Is the fact that he is going to see Kuroo in less than half an hour—after weeks of avoiding him and everyone—and Kei doesn’t know what to do with himself. Words get stuck against the rooftop of his mouth—half-formed apologies and confession he is not ready to think about yet. His knuckles get white, white as his shirt, as he presses his nails into his palms.

Kei does not want to apologise. The stupid shirt is making his skin itch, the air too hot to breathe inside the car. He rolls down the window to let the summer air in, dozes off with his cheek pressed against his seat, and wakes up with a red spot in the shape of his seatbelt on the side of his face.

"We're here," Tadashi says as he stops the car.

Kei looks up and up and up and all he sees are stairs carved in stone, bushes, and trees flanking them on each side, pink and yellow flowers and dark green ferns everywhere.

"Are you sure?"

"It's up those stairs, and then into the woods. Shouyou told me to follow the lights."

"Lights?"

The world is turning gold as it sets behind the forest. The shadows get long, stretch toward their car. Kei does not want to go into that forest.

"I do not want to go in there."

Tadashi throws him an amused look. "I'm pretty sure that whatever you think it's going to eat you in there, will get to you faster if you stay here. Alone. With no one to protect you whatsoever."

Kei gets out of the car before Tadashi finishes his sentence.

They are up on a hill, the city sprawled behind them in the valley, electric and restless. Kei can feel it even here, how it pulses, how it pushes and pulls and never rests, his mother a bright spot blinking in that network. But it pales with what he feels when he is looking at those stairs. Unnamed feelings swim in his stomach, make him feel slightly sick, and slightly woozy as if he is not quite awake. Something is calling for him.

_What would mother say?_

Tadashi says, "Let's go," clasps him on the shoulder.

They start climbing.

*

It feels like they climb forever. Moss starts to cover every inch of the stone stairs, travels up contorted tree trunks, hanging like lace from the twisted branches. It gets harder to breathe, air humid with life and so much green. So much life. It vibrates around them, under their feet as they go higher. Kei chokes on it; resents it.

Tadashi is quiet next to him, eyes round, excited, like a child seeing magic for the first time. Kei wants to laugh in his face.

It gets darker gradually. At first, it looks like it's catching up from behind. The night gets to the city first, before it comes for them, tendrils of toxic smoke trying to pull at their heels. Kei does not look back. It spreads around them, oozing from behind the green, green, trees, leaking from the tips of the ferns and strange purple flowers, stretches toward their bodies. Kei presses his arms against his torso, fear-numb and mind blurry. It’s in front of them, black smoke, gentle as it flows toward them, as it circles them, around their necks, their elbows, the back of their knees. Fingers cold, like death. Their clothes are too thin for the sudden chill that wraps around them. No sun penetrates the thickness of the forest. Cold does not exist, just the absence of heath.

Suddenly, the world turns black, as if someone has shut off the light.

They stop moving. Kei cannot breathe.

It's black. All around them.

Kei cannot breathe.

"Tsukki?"

He cannot see.

They are going to—

It starts with a flicker, a dot of light, there, right there. Kei sees it from the corner of his eyes. When he turns—knocks his arms against Tadashi, almost sends both of them sprawling on the ground—it’s gone. He holds his breath.

Another flicker, winking at him, getting closer until it settles on his nose.

It starts with a flicker, and then another one and another one.

Light envelopes the forest gradually and between one blink and another, thousands of fireflies surround them. They illuminate the forest from within, and the forest changes with it. There are no shadows to make them trip. The flowers bloom, yellow, so yellow, on green long stems, small and delicate like crystal bells. The moss, the wood, the leaves, they turn blue in the sudden light, they shine as if they are made of glass. Kei touches a tree and the surface is sharp and slippery and he gasps. It is glass.

"Oh," Tadashi says. He’s breathless as he takes everything in.

A sort of desperate apprehension grips Kei's insides, makes him want to scream. There is nothing to impress him, not when he has already met Kuroo, not when he has already had Kuroo’s hands against his skin. There is nothing wonderful about the shadows lurking behind the trees, misshapen forms without faces, with only ferns in their ways stopping them from grabbing at their human, fragile bodies. Eyes without eyelids watch them from behind the leaves.

There is nothing wonderful about a world that is trying to eat them alive.

“We should keep going. We’re probably late,” Kei says and starts going.

Time might be just a concept here, but Kei can’t stand the forest. It’s everything he aches to have and everything he wants to reject, massed in a globe for him to keep. Tiny blue faes with velvet wings tickle his arms, tug at Tadashi’s bun until strands fall around his face. He laughs and laughs and laughs. Kei feels only dread.

Mushrooms with round hats light up ahead of them, showing them the way. When Tadashi touches one with the tip of his finger, it rings like a delicate bell and the sound slips away from them in a chorus of voices, carrying around the forest the news of their arrival.

When the stairs end, when the yellow flowers swallow the earth around them, when the trees open up to a clearing so large, so full of life and energy and light, Kei feels weak in the knees.

Tobio and Kunimi wait for them at the gate covered in roses, thorns turned away from the visitors. They wave, smile big and eyes sparkling, and offer each of them a jade cup full of warm, pink liquid.

“We were told you were coming,” says Tobio as he pulls each one of them in a hug. He’s dressed completely in white, the embroidery on his clothes black and orange as it swirls in organic patterns around his torso. Kunimi wears a simpler model, purple flowers sewn on his cuffs.

Tadashi drinks from his cup licks his lips with how sweet it is. “Where did you get those?” he asks and points to the glorious yellow wreaths on Tobio and Kunimi’s head.

Tobio tries to pronounce the names, stumbles over the syllables.

“Sanziene,” Kunimi says patiently. “They gave it to us when we arrived.”

Tadashi claps his hands. “So are we gonna get one too?”

*

The festival starts where the forest ends, but it feels worlds away from the darkness that lurks behind the trees. The moon up in the sky watching over the clearing, and the sun among them, a flicker trapped in every globe of light carried by butterflies with lapis lazuli wings and bugs with ruby eyes. It tastes like safety, the part of a dream where Kei can do anything and everything without repercussions. It’s a warm embrace, enveloping him from behind, holding him close and guiding his every step over soft grass, tender ground.

Kei wasn’t even aware that a world like this exists behind a town that doesn’t have much going on for it.

Joy is overflowing all around him. Around them. It bubbles from within, colouring _their_ smiles, shining off the silver earrings in t _heir_ ears, the tattoos painting t _heir_ skin. The white of their clothes is but a mirror, thousands of different shades of orange reflecting off their chest as the fire burns blood red in the middle of the clearing.

They walk around, blinking curiously at the wood stalls. People offer them food. Caramelized apples, sweet nuts in paper cones, boiled and grilled corn, cherries and strawberries and cucumber sandwiches. His friends accept wholeheartedly, lick the tips of their fingers as juice trickles down their hands. Kei keeps his arms close to his body, fingers curled in the seams of his pants. His heart but a scared rabbit hiding behind his ribcage.

He looks around the clearing. Everyone is dressed in a different shade of white, everyone is wearing a yellow wreath on their heads. None of them sit on red curls. Where is Shouyou? When he asks his friends, they shrug. Their messages were left unanswered.

The music comes from the guitars playing around the fire, the owls and cuckoos, the crickets and chirps hidden in the dark. The whisper of the nearby river—bubbling dark-blue and purple—promises a moment of reprieve when the sweat sticks the shirts to their backs. It’s already full of giggling children, pants wet to their knees, splashing each other, pushing each other, throwing flowers down the stream. He expects to find Shouyou among them, but he doesn’t.

He looks at his watch, sees that Shouyou’s birthday happens in a few hours. Kei has prepared a gift for him, and it waits on the bed back at the dorm. Now, the only things he wants to do is have a drink together to celebrate. But Shouyou is nowhere to be seen.

Girls with yellow crowns and linked arms jump in pairs of two over the smaller burning logs. Laugh as the fire scorches the end of their white dresses, the soft skin on their feet. When Tobio asks one of the ladies on the side about it, he and Kunimi get roped into it. They jump, hand in hand, and they trip when they land. Wishes of prosperity, of fertility, of sickness being cured the following year reach Kei ears as he wanders around, as he tries to take everything in and reject it all the same. The wind carries the words to the sky. The moon accepts them in its craters.

It’s not a festival, but a celebration of everything that’s living and alive. It's nature, untouched and buoyant, all around them, breathing through them. Kei feels dizzy with it and he didn’t even touch his wine.

 _They_ are not hiding their tattoos. _They_ dance around the fire, hands joined and pulling each other in circles. _They_ play cards and tell stories and kiss each other on the cheeks. _They_ make flower crowns that are gifts to every curious visitor. Kei refuses each one of them. He walks around, arms limp at his sides, mouth dry, heart weighing him down. He has lost Tadashi and Tobio somewhere in the crowd. Shouyou is nowhere to be found.

 _They_ shimmer, bright candles in the dead of the night. _They_ shimmer, apparitions out of this world. Eyes—mirror to another realm.

 _Witches_ , the wind whispers. _Witches._

Kei chokes on longing, on desperation. If this is a dream, he wants to wake up. Thinks of his grandma surrounded by herbs and flowers, cookbooks with strange recipes, ointments and liquid medicine that made his pain go away before he managed to blink.

Witches, and in the center of them all, Kuroo.

Kei has not seen him in the crowd, but strangely enough, he feels Kuroo’s presence, his pull, the hydrangea flower smell.

Kuroo—on the tip of Kei’s tongue.

Kuroo—in his lungs.

He spins and wanders, feet catching the rhythm of a folk song. There is no wine in his veins, but he feels drunk. Grass caresses his ankles, the red bracelet heavier than before. When he touches it, it zings up his spine in bursts of electricity.

Someone puts a flower crown on his head. Kei startles and the wreath falls forward, blocking his eyes as he turns. He lifts it with trembling hands.

“Hello, you.”

Kuroo—in front of his face, surreal, dressed in white shirt and white pants cinched in the middle by a white belt. Embroidered blue flowers cascade down his shoulders, black chrysanthemum and hydrangea shifting on his skin with every breath he takes. He’s brilliant and brilliant and brilliant, a torch came alive, burning from within.

“You surprised me,” Kuroo says as he fixes the crown back on Kei’s head, fingers tangling in his hair. His eyes shine gold, so gold. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

What is Kei supposed to say to this?

“Kuroo, I’m— “

“Don’t apologize for something you’ve meant to say all along,” Kuroo says back, a reflection of the past. It guts Kei, but he doesn’t find any malice, any resentment behind those words. “How do you like it?”

Kei shrugs, avoiding to look at the man, the witch, in front of him.

“It’s...overwhelming.” The leaves fall in his ears, ticklish and fragile. “Do you do this every year?”

Kuroo’s hand is warm and big on his shoulder, fingers barely touching where they meet bare skin. A silver snake uncurls from around his finger, climbing up the side of Kei’s neck. He stands still until the tiny snake hides behind the flowers, above his brow.

Kuroo smiles. “She likes you.” Briefly, he touches Kei's neck with the back of his hand before he removes it.

Kei shivers. “Is she going—”

“Not going to hurt you, I promise. Not when I’m around.”

The music flares up around them. Someone has brought drums and a violin. The beat picks up and people are gathering around the fire, whooping and applauding. Kuroo looks their way, a faraway look in his eyes.

“Have you seen Shouyou?”

“Probably with Atsumu.”

“His birthday is tomorrow. He said we should have a drink here. Together.” Kei tries to keep the jealousy out of his voice, but he can’t. Kuroo notices too. It’s the way his eyes soften when he hears what Kei has to say.

“They were weaving flower crowns earlier. They probably lost track of time.”

Kei touches his own. “Like mine.”

“Like yours. Sanziene and wheat. It’s for protection.”

“Against what?”

“Against what cannot be seen.” He laughs, dismissing the joke, but it could not have been a joke. Nothing about this festival feels like a joke. He curls his fingers around Kei’s elbow, pulls him in. The drums beat louder around them. “Dance with me?”

“I don’t really—”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence. Dancing is not for him, but Kuroo pays him no mind as he pulls him in.

They go where the crowd is. Kuroo flashes him a huge grin, sharp canines shining for a second before he steps closer. Kei tries to focus on anything but Kuroo’s collarbones, the line of his neck, the way he tilts his chin up to smile at him. Kuroo takes his hand, fingers against fingers, skin against skin.

Kei doesn’t know what to do with himself. His body is frozen, desire a furious thing spasming in his stomach. He can’t do this.

Kuroo smiles like he knows. His other hand goes on Kei’s waist. He feels Kuroo’s body heat through his shirt. Kei tries to breathe. It knocks his heart out of place.

And—they start dancing.

The music is strange, a tapestry of joyous notes and soulful violin. Kuroo leads and Kei’s feet follow, a storm of feelings brewing in his stomach. The tiny snake in his wreath slithers down his temple, curls around his ear, like an earring. Kuroo leans in, touches it with the tip of his fingers.

Around them, butterflies with lapis lazuli wings. Globes of light floating in the air, glass bugs flying around them. Kuroo’s hands heavy on his waist.

“You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

Kuroo spins them around. “Would you miss me if I went away?” His smile is crooked, torn at the edges.

Kei knows the question. It’s not the first time he hears it, but now there is a sort of urgency attached to it. Kei, who has never learned how to voice the things he wants, says, “Are you finally going to stop bothering me?”

Humour is good. His body is still ablaze from where Kuroo is touching him, he still can’t look his dancing partner in the eye. “Is that even possible?”

Kuroo laughs, head tilted back. “Do you want to find out?”

Kei shrugs, his fingers involuntarily squeezing around Kuroo’s. “It’s you we’re talking about. Even if you die, you’d probably find a way to haunt me. You’ll send locusts in a storm or you’d make the ground shake just to make me trip.” Witches are known to be powerful. They could probably bring down the moon on his head if they wish to. “You’d probably make it rain when I’m outside in my flip flops. Or turn my coffee into a very bitter tea. Or make coffee disappear. Entirely.” He shudders at the thought, but he’s starting to laugh. His shoulders relax and he lets himself flow with the music.

Kuroo is looking at him, lips parted, eyes clouded.

“Ain’t no rest for the wicked, right?” Kei says. “You’d find a way to haunt everyone from your grave just because you like attention. So vain, Kuroo, so vain.”

They have slowed down, even if the music flares up around them. Kuroo doesn’t say anything, and Kei, afraid that it’s because of him, can’t stop talking. “Can you come back as a ghost? Do I need to exorcise you if you go all crazy on me?”

Kuroo leans in and kisses Kei.

It’s a quick press of lips, feverish and demanding. It stops too soon, too suddenly.

Kei opens his eyes, lips tingling from the sensations. He looks at Kuroo, at his bewildered face.

There is a hunger deep inside Kei and it demands things Kei does not know how to ask for. They don’t even have a name. Kei has been hungry for so long. He is so tired.

Kei wants. So Kei takes.

He surges forward, stops Kuroo from questioning this any further. Hands around the fine bones of his face, Kei steals the air, the laugh, the taste of summer right out of his mouth.

It’s not hot and desperate like their first kiss was. Kei wants to learn Kuroo all over again. Wants to taste the honey of his voice, the power in his blood. If he hopes that some of it will bleed into him, that’s a thought for another time.

Kuroo falls against him, hands around his waist. Kei presses his fingers below his jaw, tilts his head just right, bites his lips and Kuroo’s mouth falls open as he melts against Kei’s body.

The world is a myriad of sensations overlapping each other. It’s everything happening all at once.

Kei breathes through his nose. Kuroo pulls him into his chest.

"Tetsurou."

“Shh," Kuroo says and this time he is the one to kiss him. Fingers trail up the sides of his neck, tangled in his hair. Kuroo presses insistent kisses to his eyelids, on his temples, next to his ear. Scraps his teeth on the edge of his jaw, bites gently just to feel Kei shudder against him.

 _I am kissing a witch, mother,_ Kei thinks. The ridiculousness of it all makes Kei break the kiss and hide his face in Kuroo’s shoulder. He laughs because he is kissing a witch and he is happy.

Is this what magic feels like?

Kuroo touches his cheek with the back of his hand. “Are you okay?”

Kei looks up. He looks at the beautiful, beautiful man in his arms. He kisses him again and again and again. The world suddenly feels full of possibilities, and Kei is ready. He reaches out his hand and takes.

*

Four days later, on 24th June, the actual day of Sânziene, Kuroo Tetsurou disappears.

*

June ends in rain, Kei finishes his third year in college and moves back in with his parents for the summer. Nothing has changed about his room. Same old bare walls, same shelves bent by book spines. Chemistry and physics and biology—obligation wrapped in festive paper, an attempt from his mother to shape him in her image. The history books and mythology anthologies, folklore dictionaries and collections of fairy tales, apologies from his brother when words have not been enough. Under his bed, hidden away in boxes, dinosaurs figures, botanical dictionaries, illustrated books on plants and birds and trees. Textbooks on how to prepare the best tea, the best potion, the best cure. All of them from his grandmother, stored away by his father and given to him when his mother wasn’t looking.

Kei doesn’t allow himself to think too much. He keeps to himself the result from his exams, communicates them over dinner when his mother starts telling him about this summer internship at a lab hidden between palms trees on the sunny coast. His palms get so sweaty so fast he would drop the fork if he wasn’t gripping it so hard.

“Of course, mother,” it’s all he says when she reprimands him for the Bs and Cs. Not a single A.

_What were you thinking, Kei? Akiteru would have scored straight As._

Kei doesn’t know what he is thinking.

Kei doesn’t think. He stops every disturbing thought with a new chemistry problem each morning, with a new article or science reports each night. He asks his mother about them the next day, gathering all the excitement he’s being capable of in clipped sentences, noting down whatever she says. It gets him a ghost of a smile, a tiny glimmer of approval in her dark cold eyes.

At lunch, he tends to his father’s garden. He takes the books from under the bed, reads about how to water the tomatoes and the red bell peppers, how to care for the dill and the oregano, the mint plant, and bay laurel. Tiny creatures with slanted black eyes crawl about his feet and he gently nudges them back into the shrubberies beyond the fence. This is no place for them. His mother would kill them if she was to see them. At the end of the day his fingers stain with green and it doesn’t come out no matter how much he scrubs his hand with soap.

During the summer, there is not a speck of dust on the furniture, no dirt on the wooden floors. The granite sink is spotless and the rooms smell like lavender. If there is one thing Kei can change, is the clinical smell that seems to have impregnated in every corner of the house.

Kei does everything and anything only to stay there, in that godforsaken town he has hated so much since he was young. Being shipped to the West Coast is not part of his plans.

He does not think about June, but every now and then, between one dream and another, his heart gives in and he wakes up with the question on his lips.

What if Kuroo calls?

*

Kuroo, in fact, does not call.

Kuroo did not pick up his phone when Kei called him after. After the night of the festival. After the dance. After the fire that scorched their heels once they jumped over burning logs, making wishes for a better future. After the kiss. The kiss. The kiss.

That morning—after—Kei woke up elated, his childhood bed suddenly too small for him. His wreath was on the desk, tiny flowers half-wilted from the stuffing heath in the room. He waited until noon to send the first messages, another few hours with no reply to make the first call. It went straight to the voice mail.

Kei does not check his phone, but he keeps it on vibrations in his back pocket as he helps with dinner, puts it under his pillow as he tries to sleep.

Tadashi has driven him back to the campus. Kei packed up his life in two suitcases and one box, finished whatever else was left to end another year, and went back to his hometown, dread too overwhelming.

In his house, on his bed, between the walls that hold so many memories of his grief and jealousy and despair, Kei gives them another type of sadness, one he is not accustomed to yet. Until he has a name for it, he will give it a face. He has the summer to learn it and—unlearn it. When he will leave behind this house, he will be as clean as his mother’s scalpel.

His room, an album to his mind, to the ugliest emotions a human heart can possess. Will this be his legacy?

*

Cat did not follow him home. In fact, Cat was nowhere to be found in the last few days before leaving the campus.

Kei looks for the black animal everywhere. In the courtyard, behind his dorm building, in the trees behind the labs. He goes to his studying spot, waits for hours and the only thing that comes to him is a bird with pearls instead of eyes, moss wings instead of feathers.

When he asks Yaku about it, the only thing he receives is a scathing glared and a hand gesture that can only mean _are you stupid?_

Yachi is nowhere to be found.

Kei goes home without Cat and does not think about it again.

*

_Would you miss me if I went away?_

Kei thinks about it when he can’t sleep. The darkness of the night allows himself to admit to himself what the clarity of the moon couldn’t.

_Yes. Yes, I would._

*

Kei calls Shouyou, and when he doesn’t answer, he texts him every day for a week straight.

**Kei [20:13]**

Shouyou. Have you seen Kuroo lately?

He’s not picking up his phone.

**Kei [9:25]**

You there?

Why aren’t you answering your phone?

Are you home?

**Kei [1:47]**

Are you with Miya?

Could you ask him a question for me?

**Kei [15:06]**

It’s about Kuroo

Btw, I think Cat disappeared. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Maybe it’s gonna be there in the fall when we go back

**Kei [6:11]**

Shouyou?

*

Two weeks later, after tens of unread messages and unanswered calls, Kei turns off his phone and hides it in a drawer. Picks up the ugliest pair of shorts he has and goes out, into the garden. Music plays from the old radio set up on the porch and fresh lemonade is waiting for him in the fridge. He puts on gardening gloves and starts pulling the weeds, offering them to curious fae who stand hidden behind bushes and watch him work.

*

It’s another two weeks before Shouyou shows up on his doorsteps, wild-eyed and frantic.

Both his parents are at home. It’s a quiet sort of Tuesday, the world is still and hot and there is nothing to do, nothing to look forward to. His mother is reading a book. His father is looking up recipes on his laptop. Later, she will take out every single plate from the upper cupboards and load them in the dishwasher. She does that once a month. His father will go into the attic, look for a jigsaw puzzle—they have a few lying around for when they get bored—and go back down to their living room to assemble it on the kitchen island. Whatever they do, they stay in the same room. Always together, always a touch apart.

It’s his mother who opens the door when the knocking becomes insistent. Kei is upstairs, perusing his botanical books, heart beating out of his chest as he realizes that those are in fact magic botanical books. He closes the one he is reading with a loud thump when he hears his mother’s voice. Goes downstairs to find her waiting by the open door, yellow latex gloves on and hair clipped back with a flower pin. It’s a metallic hydrangea, a lifeless piece of jewelry and yet Kei can’t stop looking at it.

Outside, on the doorsteps, Shouyou Hinata is looking at him as if he has just found out the world ends in three days. He’s delivering the news with a smile on his lips, but he is not fooling anyone.

“Tsukki, we need to talk.”

His mother doesn’t like Shouyou or any of his friends. She tolerates them because she believes in using her energy for better things. Her eyes say that much, even when her lips are curled into a polite smile.

“Would you like to come in?”

“No need, mother,” Kei answers for both of them and steps out, closes the door behind him.

“Tsukki.”

Kei crosses his arms over his chest, leans back against the door. Looks at Shouyou as if he is there delivering pizza. “How have you been?” he asks, proud that the words don’t shake. He had weeks of rehearsing this in his head, weeks of training his body, his voice to listen to him.

“No time for that,” comes the reply, the smile still in place. “Have you talked to Kuroo lately?”

Kei’s left eyebrow twitches before raising in an incredulous arch. “Have _you_ talked to him?”

Shouyou shakes his head. Red strands of hair fly everywhere; he pushes them behind his ears, fingers trembling as he does. “We can’t find him. It’s like—like the earth swallowed him.”

“It’s not like that is an impossible thing to do, considering—“ and Kei waves his hand around, a gesture that’s supposed to mean _everything._

“It’s not like that. Tsukki, he just—”

“Then explain, please. You sure look like you know much more than I do.”

There is something Shouyou is not telling him. He is flinty, a scared rabbit ready to jump and hide at the first loud sound. The clothes on him are too large, even for someone who dresses on the regular in shirts that slip off a shoulder in calculated carelessness. There is something smudged on his collarbones, but Kei can’t tell what it is.

“Your phone’s off, Tsukki. I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.”

Is that reprimand Kei hears? “Before or after I’ve been trying to get a hold of you?”

Shouyou’s body stops twitching. “When did you—”

“Tell me,” Kei says, takes a step closer and another one. They are toe to toe now, breathing the same air, knowing different things. Once upon a time, Shouyou would have anticipated Kei’s outbursts. Now, Kei looks at Shouyou and sees a stranger.

What is that thing on Shouyou’s collarbones?

Kei asks, “How is Miya Atsumu?” and enjoys the way Shouyou flinches away from his voice.

“Ok, I know. I know. I am sorry for ignoring you. I know I haven’t been a good friend—”

“Do you?”

Shouyou bristles. The edges of his panic bleed into anger. Finally, the smile drops, replaced with exasperation. “If you’d let me finish my goddamn sentences maybe you’d understand.”

“What is there to understand?” Kei asks, genuinely confused. “There is _them,_ and there is me.” He shrugs, does not want to look at his friend anymore. “I think things are pretty clear. Is there anything else—”

Silence stretches between them as Kei doesn’t finish his question and Shouyou doesn’t jump in with an answer at the ready. His eyes are looking for something on Kei’s face, and when they find the unnamed feeling, they grow wider than before.

“You really think I’d do that, don’t you? Abandon you.”

Kei lifts one shoulder. There is nothing left to feel at hearing the words said out loud. The previous nights swallowed all of his screams.

“Haven’t you?”

The smudge on Shouyou’s collarbones stresses him out. It’s there and Kei wants to wipe it off. He reaches out and pulls at his collar. Roses in black and white spill out from behind, down to his abdomen and around his shoulders. Kei takes a step back.

“Get out,” Kei says in half a voice. Clears his throat and tries again. “Get out.”

Shouyou’s eyes are big and scared and Kei has never seen him so still in his life.

“Kei, I know how this looks like, but I—”

He has _their_ tattoo on him.

“Leave, Shouyou.”

Suddenly, Shouyou is talking too fast, stumbling over words and meanings. “Kuroo needs our help. We need to find him before it’s too late. It’s about a curse. He—he’s under some kind of curse. It’s big. I don’t know the details. I just know Atsumu has been looking for him for the past month and there’s nothing. Nothing. Please, Kei, listen to me.”

Kei laughs, loud and bitter. “Curse? Do you even hear yourself?”

“It has something to do with black cats. You know how he—”

“Black cats” Kei cuts in, something entirely different getting stuck in his throat.

“You can’t possibly tell me you didn’t know. That Kuroo is Cat. I didn’t say a thing because I thought you’re being oblivious on purpose.”

Kei did consider the possibility a few times, but it was one thing to have it confirmed. He thinks about Cat, replaces the animal with Kuroo, and wants to scream.

“Well,” Kei says and takes a step back, “sucks for him, I guess.”

“Kei—”

“I have to go inside. Good luck finding him.”

Kei closes the door in Shouyou’s face, leaves him standing speechless on the stairs. His fingers are white as he squeezes the doorknob, slides down against the door only to hide his face in his knees. He’s shaking and he can’t seem to stop.

_Would you miss me if I went away?_

*

This is how his mother finds him. Curled in the hallway, cheek pressed to the side of his knee.

“Is everything alright?”

Kei doesn’t reply. He’s staring at a spot on the carpet and thinks that it looks a little bit discoloured. He reaches out, touches it and it feels a little burned too.

“Kei.”

His bones are weighing him down. He is so tired. “What, mom?”

“I don’t think that’s the way you should talk to me.”

His father comes into view, stops when he sees the two of them there. He holds the puzzle box in one hand, a beer in the other, and doesn’t say a thing. He watches, as he has always done, from behind his rectangular glasses. His mother no longer has her latex gloves on, but the pin is still there, holding her hair up.

Kei lifts his head up. Laughs once, humourless. “Yes, of course. Let me try again.” He stands up from the floor, dusts his pants, and straightens his shirt. “So, I am in love with a witch and said witch is probably dying. He’s under some kind of curse, I don’t know.” He shrugs and sees his father from the corner of his eye putting his beer away on the side table. “Please tell me what I should do about this, mother?”

Kei looks at his mother, at her face losing colour until all it’s left is bruised skin under her eyes, stretched wrinkles on her forehead. “Tell me, Kei, is this witch also a black cat?”

The question takes him by surprise. He blinks at her, and then opens his mouth and says a meek, “Yes.”

“Ah,” she says and her eyes shutters. Her face regains its colour and she straighteners her back. A doctor dealing with an incurable disease. “The curse of the black cat.” When she looks at Kei, is with a sort of feeling that he hasn’t seen before.

“Do you know about it?”

She smiles. “All my life, everything I did, was to prevent this. But you went ahead—” and she spreads her fingers in front of her, an explosion of emotions, “—and ignored my advice. I warned you, Kei. Don’t tell me I didn’t.”

“Mom—”

At last, his father interferes. “Darling, I think you should be—”

“I told you, Kei. I told you. That world is not meant for you. Now you’re paying the consequences and there is nothing you can do about it.”

*

Akiteru comes home in the second week of August and stays for a week. The house swells up with the sound of his laughter, their mother’s voice bubbling up the stairs as she inquires after his patients, after his colleagues, and daily cases. Kei stays on top of the stairs, head pressed to the handrail, and listens. If only he wasn’t disgusted by blood. He closes his eyes and imagines himself sitting at the table, across from his father, recounting how his anatomy lab went. How exciting it was to look at corpses, to touch a human heart, even if it was petrified. His mother’s smile is warm and it’s aimed at him, wrinkles filled with joy around her eyes as the future she imagined for her sons plays out in front of her.

She is proud. Kei knows, in a distant kind of way, that he slipped into a fitful sleep. His mind is aware that it is but a dream. His mother is proud but there is no expression on her face. An empty mask ready to be programmed according to reality.

Gentle fingers touch Kei’s temples. He opens his eyes.

“Little brother,” Akiteru says, two steps down below. “I am home.”

Kei smiles, says, “Welcome home,” and then starts crying.

*

August nights are the only time of the year when the summer feels like summer. The atmosphere has a neverending quality about it, possibilities trapped in every surprise thunderstorm. August drags its feet as it descends into fall, it surges with green, one last effort at life, before it changes again and takes away the warmth.

There is nothing like the sky during August nights. Sky so full of stars, it could burst with them.

Kei loves this month because it reminds him of his brother.

There is a tent sent up in the backyard of the Tsukishima household and two brothers are sitting in it. One barely finished crying his eyes out and the other is looking up, up, up through a binocular.

“There are a few clouds tonight,” Akiteru says, voice strangled as he is laying back on a blanket, arms suspended in the air. “We might catch some falling stars, thought. If we pay attention.”

The Perseids’ peak is not for another few days, but every night is a good night for stargazing. They also have a different tent, one big enough for both of them, but Akiteru insisted on using the one from their childhood. It’s not enough to hold both of them, so they are now sprawled half on the grass on a blanket, and half inside the tiny tent.

Kei doesn’t say anything as his brother rambles about the stars. For the first time in years, he doesn't care how many wishes he can bag in one single night. He listens to the crickets, to the owls hidden in the trees, and looks around the garden, eyes unfocused.

Lights blink in and out between the grass blades. He knows what they are, what they are asking of him. Ever since Shouyou has visited him, they pop up uninvited around Kei, pleading the best they could to go find Kuroo. Translucent fairies and butterflies with wings in two colours, crystal bugs, and birds with velvet wings. Flowers blooming in his way, stretching their necks and touching his skin in a whisper of a plea.

They all whisper the same thing. _Please_.

Kei looks the other way. He is not meant for that world.

There is nothing he can do.

Akiteru is quiet next to him. He sets aside the binocular and rests his hands on his stomach. Kei realizes he is preparing for a conversation. He saw it in his eyes as he collapsed crying in his arms earlier in the house.

“Have you thought about calling grandma?”

That is not what Kei was expecting to hear. He lifts himself up on his elbows, looks at his brother with an incredulous stare. “Uh, no?” The tears still linger in his voice and it makes him wince.

Akiteru hums. “I call her every week. She always asks me if I have found a nice girl to marry. Goes on and on about how the redheads are the spawn of the devil.” He laughs, low and warm. “Good thing I do not meet too many redheads at my job.”

“You talk to grandma?”

“Of course. I taught her how to use her email and now she sends me the most outrageous recipes she finds.” He passes a hand over his mouth, hiding a yawn. “I am privileged enough to have a kitchen big enough to sustain all the damage I do to my pots.”

His brother talks and Kei still can’t wrap his mind around it. “Grandma talks to you?”

Akiteru rolls over on his side. “Sure thing. She sounds like she has more energy than most residents at my hospital. They are all in their thirties and she is almost in her eighties. She would give them a run for their money.”

“But—mom said—”

The breeze picks up, bringing them stray oak leaves. They fly down between them, on their arms and chest and legs. Akiteru picks one up and taps Kei’s cheek with it. “If mom tells you to jump in front of a train because she thinks it would miraculously go through you, would you do it?”

Kei glares at him.

“Fine, fine,” Akiteru laughs. “Here’s another question for you: have you ever done something just because it made you happy?”

“Of course,” Kei bursts. “I’m studying chemistry because I like it.”

“Did you like it or was it the compromise you liked best?”

Once upon a time, Kei told his mother that the sight of blood makes him faint. He can’t stand a paper cut on his finger, a tiny razor snip on his father’s face. Online articles presented a thousand different cures and none of them worked on Kei. Two years before graduating high-school, Kei told his mother that he would become a pharmacist. He wouldn’t be able to help people directly, but he will create something that could pave the way. Eyes brimming with hope, he looked at his mother, asked for her blessing.

Eyes full of disappointment, his mother gazed at him. “Do not let me down again, Kei,” she has said before walking away.

“Did you know,” Akiteru says as he looks at Kei, “that mother wanted me to become a neurosurgeon? She told me it’s the most rewarding career a doctor could have. I said fine. Let’s give it a try.”

“But you are a pediatric surgeon.”

Akiteru smiles. “That, I am. Two months into my residency, I realised I really didn’t want to be studying all of my life. Granted, choosing to be a doctor meant I chose a life of constant studying and learning and growing. But—“ Akiteru says as he taps the side of his nose, “—there is too much studying, even for me. Going into that field felt like giving up my social life. I like getting laid once in a while too, you know? Not just getting horny over brains.”

Kei blinks at him, the words registering a second too late. Then he drops his head into his arms and groans. “You shitty brother. That wasn’t necessary.”

Laughter fills the courtyards, bounces off the textile walls of the tent.

“My point is, dear brother,” Akiteru continues, “that mom and dad are our parents, but we are not them. It’s about what you want to do, not what others want you to do.”

“But what if—”

“Disappoint them? Upset them? Make them angry choosing a life that you’re proud of?” Akiteru shrugs, flipping his hand up. “It’s their own fault for trusting another person with their own happiness. We’re only responsible for ourselves.

“In conclusion,” Akiteru says with a sort of flourish he might use when talking to starry-eyed med students, “Do what makes you happy. You are your own person Kei. Aren’t you tired?”

He is. Tired. The constant weight on his shoulders, around his heart, became so familiar he doesn’t know who he is without it. Is there a life on the other side of this? His eyes are burning and he rubs his nose against his sleeve to hide it.

“Mom seems to still like you,” he says.

Akiteru’s hand is soothing as he goes up and down on his back. “Of course. I told her she either accepts my decisions or she can live a life without one of her sons.”

Kei looks at his brother. The words sound strange to his ears.

“It’s true.” Akiteru laughs. “She likes bragging about her sons’ accomplishments too much to be kept out of the loop. Yes, even you, little brother. She just—you need to let her know what you want. No regrets.”

Kei hums. He doesn’t know what he wants. He likes chemistry and his career is decided at this point. Does he have enough time to figure out the rest of it?

Akiteru looks at him as if he knows what’s troubling him. As if he understands. “You’ll always have me, little brother. And there is time. I mean,” he says and there is a teasing tilt to his voice, “you should do whatever the hell you want. Totally. But after you call grandma. That’s non-negotiable.”

Kei picks up a pillow and hits his brother in the face with it.

_f a l l_

Kei waits until classes start again to call his grandmother.

Tobio drives them both back to campus and doesn’t ask why Shouyou is in Tadashi’s car instead of there, pestering them about the bad music they listen to or making plans for dinner when it’s barely nine in the morning. Tobio keeps the conversation light, complains about his trip to Europe, and how much he doesn’t like French food.

Kei laughs, because it is expected of him, because otherwise he would get out of the car and run all the way to the campus. Possibly screaming. Possibly crying.

Tobio doesn’t ask about his restlessness either. When he stops in front of the dorm building, he doesn’t turn to look at Kei. He keeps his hands on the steering wheel, facing forward, frowning at some freshmen carrying something that looks like a cage.

“You know you can count on us, right? Shouyou too.”

Kei feels choked with the things he didn’t say all summer. “I know,” he manages to get out eventually. “I know.”

Tobio nods once, twice. “Good. Now, out with you. Akira is waiting for me.”

The fourth year brings him a different room. First floor instead of the ground floor, window facing south. Otherwise, it is still the same. The desk in front of the window, a bed to the right, table, and appliances to the left. Small bookcase, small wardrobe. He takes his time cleaning the dust, mopping the floors, unpacking, and putting his books in alphabetical order. When that doesn’t satisfy him, he orders them by theme and colours.

He looks at his watch, sees it’s almost nine in the evening in Sendai. Picks up his phone, flips it up and down on his tight while he rehearses what he wants to say. Eventually, he opens up his contact list, scrolls all the way to where his grandma’s number is, and presses “call.”

The dial tone is the most harrowing sound he has ever heard. It rings and it rings and then the call connects. Kei stops fidgeting.

“Hello?”

The heart is beating in his throat. He can’t swallow around it.

“Uhm, hi grandma. It’s me, uh, Kei.” If things were different, he would have said, _it’s your favourite nephew_ , but he can’t tell that to a person he hasn’t called in a year.

“Kei, my goodness, what a pleasant surprise.” Her voice is the same. Soft and wrinkled with time, and always, always, so honest. She never said one thing she didn’t mean. Kei blames it on her for learning to reject apologies that are only offered to soothe the ego.

“I’ve been thinking about you today. I have this wonderful recipe I found online. I think you’ll love it. Your brother taught me how to use the internet, can you believe it? Now I am looking for all sorts of things online. The weather is the funniest thing. They never get it right. I do know someone who can dispel the clouds with a song. But they have to—”

“Grandma,” Kei chokes out.

She laughs, and it feels like she is next to him, holding his head on her lap, soothing his tears and worries with calloused fingers. “Is your mother difficult again, little Kei?”

Suddenly, he’s transported back in time, when he was allowed to cry his heart out because his grandmother would always hide him behind her skirts. _Little Kei._ It brings a sense of peace and belonging he thought it was long lost. “Always.”

“What if you visit me next summer? This will be my graduation gift to you. You don’t need—”

“But grandma—”

“No, listen to me. You won’t need to lift a finger. Let me spoil you. I’m not too old to look after my grandkids.”

“You’ll be eighty this year, grandma.”

“So? I bet I have more energy than you do. Without coffee. Plus, the garden misses you.”

The garden. Kei remembers it. He never felt more at home than he was in that corner of his grandma’s house, surrounded by life and energy so pure he was delirious with it. It felt very much like love. “I might come. Send me an email so I can have this in writing.”

“Do you think I am lying to you, young boy?”

Not really, but he needs to have physical proof that better times are coming. “Grandma,” he says suddenly. “Do you think black cats bring bad luck?”

He doesn’t expect her to laugh at him. He pulls the phone away, consternated by her reaction, and glares at it until it’s quiet. “What?”

“That country. Did you learn only bad things while you’ve been there?”

“No? What does this have to do with anything?”

“Black cats—or any cat for that matter—do not bring bad luck. Here,” she says and Kei knows she means there, Sendai, Japan, “it is quite lucky to have a cat around the house. Did you know they were the protectors of the underworld in Ancient Egypt? It’s all about perspective, Kei.”

Now that he thinks about it, his grandmother’s house is full of maneki neko figures. Every room has one, and each one of them is not the same as the other.

_Would you miss me if I went away?_

“Why are you asking this?”

Kei clears his voice. “Back in March, a black cat started following me around.” If the black cat turned out to be the person he has feelings for, that’s a problem he is going to deal with another day. “I have not seen it much lately.”

She laughs, but this time not at him. She laughs as if she understands. Maybe she does. “I hope you treated the good animal with sympathy. You know that it’s mostly about intention. If you think a black cat brings bad luck, you’ll have plenty of it. Next time you see the cat, you should walk toward it, not away from it. It is going to bring you good luck.”

*

Kei doesn’t waste any more time. He calls Shouyou. “Help me find Kuroo. Please, Shouyou, I’m—”

Shouyou cuts him off before he can apologise. “Meet me in 10. Bring a flashlight.” His voice sounds like understanding. Like forgiveness.

Kei tries going to class, to study and to look for the black cat—for Kuroo, for the person he loves, his heart supplies—but in the end, when he realises that his strategy doesn’t seem to work, he cuts down the first two, much to his friend’s amusement.

“Your mom will have your head on a plate for this. She’s going to do a clean, clean-cut and then drink your blood.”

Kei wrinkles his nose at the imagery. It is impossible to say that he stopped caring for her after he talked to his brother and his grandmother, after he realized that a future without Kuroo is very likely to happen. She is still her mother, she is still going to be there after Kei figures out his love life. “I’ll talk to her later. It’s not like I can magically change her mind.”

Shouyou snorts. “Magically,” he parrots back. “I think I know a guy.” He laughs and laughs and laughs, holding to his stomach and doomsday might be coming, even if it’s a different sort of doomsday and only Kei’s heart and sanity is at stake, but he had never lighter than he is, right then and there, in a very long time.

*

They look around the campus, checking the creepiest corners. They break into the school at night, search under desks and in closets, tiptoe their way around the cafeteria. The shadows don’t give him reliable answers and the flowers are too drained of energy to be of any help. Yachi tags along sometimes helps them with her own magic, and Kei realises he has never disliked her. Maybe because she has been subtle about it, careful where she let her quartz eye roam. A weather witch, she calls herself as she whistles for the clouds to part and gives them moonlight.

“How much time do we have?” Kei decides to ask one evening.

Shouyou climbs down from a tree, leaves stuck in his ginger curls. Nature looks more and more like his hair, the last burst of life before months of cold take over.

“Until—when is the fall equinox?”

Dread is sudden and sharp, tight around Kei’s organs. “September 20th. That’s in...two weeks, almost. You can’t be serious.”

Shouyou levels him a look before he pulls out his phone. “See why I was panicked back in August?” He starts typing something and this time Kei is not jealous. This time, he can control himself. “Atsumu said they had no luck either. No trace of Kuroo.”

“Do you know anything about this curse? Is he going to—”

Shouyou shakes his head. “I know as much as Atsumu knows. Kuroo has been acting strange lately. He was in his cat shape more often than not. He acted like a cat even when he was human. All cagey and distrustful.”

The afternoon spent in Yaku’s courtyard feels like it’s been ages ago. Kuroo’s hair, red as blood, soft in the sunlight, soft against Kei’s fingers. Maybe that was the moment he realized that Kuroo was Cat. Maybe he knew from the first time Cat looked at him, curious and always, always, with honesty and adoration. Just because Kuroo is in love with the world, doesn’t mean Kei is not part of that world. Kei has been such a fool. “Is it because of the curse? Is it affecting him somehow?”

Shouyou presses his hand against his collarbones, against the tattoos hidden underneath. “Bokuto told us about the curse. When Kuroo disappeared after my birthday.”

Days of despair reshape in Kei’s mind and unanswered messages and calls lose their significance. How stupid of him.

“Bokuto?”

“Silver-haired witch. He is also a dance major, I’ve seen him in passing. He deals with curses and poison and that’s why Kuroo has been hanging out with him apparently. Bokuto said that he’s been asking about curses old as time.”

“What does that even mean?”

Shouyou pushes his fingers through his hair, tugs at his roots until he grimaces with pain. “Kuroo deals with a demon curse? Or with some kind of evil curse? Bokuto said he has heard about stuff like this, but it’s like, stuff for fairy tales, even for them. He doesn’t know much. I feel like—”

“Like there is something he doesn’t tell us?”

Shouyou raises his fist for a bump. Kei taps it. “Probably. I mean, he did say it might have something to do with Kuroo’s cat form, but—Bokuto is a weary witch. He doesn’t belong to a coven. He, and together with that other witch—whatever his name is—they are on their own. They don’t belong to a coven and they don’t trust others. He listened to Kuroo because Kuroo offered his necromancer services in exchange for whatever answer he got.”

Kei’s eyebrows raise so high on his forehead he will give himself premature wrinkles. “Slow down. Necromancer?”

Shouyou laughs. It comes out more tired than anything. “You don’t even know what type of witch Kuroo is, do you?” He slaps Kei on the shoulder, a few good times. “You poor thing.”

Kei doesn’t dignify the jab with an answer of his own. The bitter, haunting guilt will be enough to keep him up at nights, so he gives into that. He feeds it with every single moment and memory he has the chance to smile at Kuroo and welcome him into his life.

If only his mother knew. But there is nothing to know when the one person Kei wants to talk about will not be around.

*

“He’s not here.” The words coming out of his mouth have a finality about them that scares him. “He can’t be here.”

Shouyou stops looking around the dumpster and glares over his shoulder. “And how do you know that? Are you some kind of clairvoyant witch?”

“Kuroo is smart,” Kei says back. “If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”

“Are you a Kuroo expert, too?”

“Shouyou. Stop fighting me on this.”

Shouyou does. They stare at each other for several moments, and then they breathe and the tension dissolves around them.

“I’m calling Atsumu to take us back home. We can look for him there.”

Kei bristles at hearing the name. “I thought they were already doing that.”

“Yes,” Shouyou says, eyes on his phone, “but in their part of the town.”

“Does it have to be your boyfriend? We can get Tadashi to drive us.”

Shouyou lifts his eyes from the screen, raises a very judgemental eyebrow at him,

“He’s an asshole,” Kei supplies.

“So are you. You’re going to be best friends before we get home.”

*

In fact, they do not become best friends. They don’t even begin to tolerate each other. Miya Atsumu is insufferable. Kei should stop calling his full name inside his head, but they are not friends, they will never be friends and frankly, Kei only says his name because he knows Shouyou will somehow catch him if he starts calling Miya Atsumu a bastard. The moment Kei settles in the back seat, seatbelt on, and hands folded on his knees, Miya Atsumu eyes him through the rearview mirror.

“I heard ya threw a jealous fit like one of the Austen ladies.”

Kei wants to strangle him. “Do you want to find Kuroo or do you want to stay here and be a little bitch?” He does not tell him that Shouyou was his friend first, that he dyed his hair red because of Kei. Knowing Miya Atsumu, he will probably shave Shouyou’s head just to spite Kei.

“Aren’t ya scared we’re gonna poison ya and transform ya into a toad?”

“Aren’t you scared that we will burn you at the stake?”

Shouyou claps his hands once, twice, the sound so loud it reverberates against the windows. “Children.” His voice is measured, his face serene. Kei knows he is very angry. “I will run you both with the car if you won’t shut the fuck up. Atsumu, start driving.”

Miya Atsumu takes one look at Shouyou and starts laughing. It looks disgusting on him, so human and so in love, but Shouyou melts a little at the sight. Miya Atsumu cups his hands around his mouth, blows into them and they light up. When he uncurls his fingers, there is a lovely honeysuckle pin, melted rose gold in the form of delicate petals. He stretches over the console and pins a few of Shouyou’s strands with it behind his ear. Kisses him on the temple, hard, and then starts driving.

*

Kei would rather suffer the smell of sweat and fried fries that is so common for his usual bus rides than listen to even ten minutes to Miya Atsumu’s horrible, horrible country music.

*

They sleep at Shouyou’s. His parents don’t question him, not when Kei walks in, only to be told by the little sister that he looks like shit, not when Miya Atsumu follows him and the same little sister asks him where his magic wand is.

Kei stares at him and dares him to say exactly what is on his mind.

“Left it home, little girl,” Miya Atsumu replies breezily. Kei laughs until his stomach hurts.

They start looking around the part of town where people don’t tattoo flowers on their skin and don’t wear birds in their hair. They print a map and check every single street that looks like it could be hiding a stray black cat. When asked if they know anything, people give them a suspicious look.

“There are many black cats around here, son.”

“He has golden eyes.”

“All of them have, dear. They say they are the devil’s pet, really.”

Shouyou drags both Kei and Miya Atsumu away before they can hit the nice lady from the flower shop.

They check the back alleys, the cemetery, the parks, and the restaurants. They climb to the rooftops, peer into private gardens, go to the river. It’s a race against time, one that Kei feels like he is losing. The panic becomes acute, a steady presence in the back of his mind, and Kei fears it’s permeance. Will he live like this? With dread and guilt clogging up his windpipe? Is there a way to atone for his sins?

Kei keeps on running. He promises himself that once he sees Cat—Kuroo—he will walk toward him, he will wish good luck upon him, give him his red bracelet.

Kei promises he would do anything.

*

Kei gets to keep his promise when they get a glimpse of Kuroo on a dreary Thursday afternoon. The sky is dark with rain, with clouds that collapse against each other, trembling when a thunder explodes in the atmosphere. They have no shadow as they run to their old school, just three lone figures out in the open when everyone is inside, under warm blankets.

The colours are dull around them and Kei remembers another day, another rain, and a wet cat trembling in his arms. It’s just a hunch, he tells them to Shouyou and Miya Atsumu, when asked why he wants to go to their old middle school.

“What do we have to lose?”

Nothing.

Less than a week, less than five days.

Kuroo is nowhere to be found.

The school grounds are deserted. When they speak, the wind carries their voices all around the sports field. It brings back laughter and shrieking and deep, painful cries. Kei starts running before he knows what he’s running to.

He finds them by the bleachers. Teenagers in their jeans and hoodies, teenagers with cigarettes fuming in the corner of their mouths. Teenagers, overzealous and righteous, stick in hand, poking at the ground. Laughing loud and bright—bright in the way only young ones know how to be, as they stand in a circle around something. Teenagers, loud and bright and sometimes so, so stupid.

Kei knows this because he has been one too.

The sky is dark with rain, the air rare, sterile. It’s suffocating standing outside, on the cusp of a storm. There is no wind. They’re breathing pure electricity.

Shouyou’s voice is in his ear. “What are they doing? Is that—”

Kei acts before his eyes registers what he’s seeing. He chases the kids away, feeling too young and too old all at once to be doing that. Shouyou holds Miya Atsumu’s hand clasped in his, implores him with his eyes to control himself. The ground shakes and shakes and shakes.

Cat whimpers softly on the ground.

The sky cries with the tears Kei cannot bring up. He takes a tentative step toward the cat—Kuroo, there is Kuroo, small and lying on the ground, whiskers trembling in the rain. He takes another step and another one.

_Next time you see the cat, you should walk toward it, not away from it. It is going to bring you good luck._

This is Kei’s worst nightmare come to life. It’s only the second time he walks toward the black cat, doesn’t run away from it. He wishes he had done this sooner. He crouches down next to it, doesn’t know where to touch it.

“Kuroo,” he whispers softly.

Cat blinks its eyes upon, looks at him through the hazy rain. It meows, because what else is there to say?

Miya Atsumu’s knees land on the mud next to him. “Let me see.”

“He’s okay. He’s okay.” His fingers are numb as he touches the Cat’s tummy, feels the wet fur, the subtle shaking. When he looks at his hand, there is red on it. His stomach lurches. “Oh.”

Shouyou moves before Kei has time to react. “Atsumu, use this. We have to get him out of the rain.” Kei can’t feel his fingers. They’re painted in red, red, red. He can’t smell it, but the taste is there, metallic and salty, going down his throat. Suddenly, Kei feels dizzy.

Shouyou takes off his jacket. Miya Atsumu carefully lifts Cat and they wrap it in his jacket, holds the animal to his chest. “I’m taking him to his mother. She’ll know what to do.”

Five days until fall equinox and Kei doesn’t know what to do. He is on the ground, mud sipping through his pants, rain beating down on him. Disgust squeezes at his heart. He feels pathetic.

“I got it.” Miya Atsumu doesn’t even look at him. “Stay with Kei.”

Finally, Kei finds his voice. “Is he going to be okay?” He doesn’t look at his hands.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

They stay on the school grounds until Kei gets his breathing back in check. Shouyou rubs his stiff shoulders and waits until Kei is done scrubbing his hands on his pants until the skin on the tips of his fingers is red and stinging where rain falls onto it. Too bad he can’t scrub his heart until it’s shiny and new again.

*

When no one calls a day later, Shouyou takes Kei by the hand and drags him there.

It’s a long walk, one they make on foot, and surprisingly Shouyou knows the way, guides him through the city, turning corners and ducking under stone archways and through abandoned courtyards. It makes something dark, something like jealousy, boil in Kei’s stomach. How many missed opportunities just because Kei was a coward? He could have been the one to know the way there if he weren’t a hypocrite. He could have known which one of the houses belonged to Kuroo if his room was messy or bare of any personal belongings. If there were mint and coriander and rosemary in his garden, or tulips and roses and daffodils. If he had books on every available surface, notes scribbled all over the pages, or if he had one tablet and everything was organized in folders.

Those moments belong to a past Kei didn’t choose.

The shift in atmosphere and decorum is subtle. It’s the same town with the same houses and buildings, until it suddenly isn’t. People dress and talk the same way, until they aren’t.

Kei blinks, and he slides into a different world.

He wants to stay, to take it all in, to classify every single detail and difference, but they don’t have time to wander around. Shouyou’s hand around his wrist pulls him forward, and Kei barely has time to catch glimpses of a place that Kuroo calls home. Floating umbrellas following their owners as they go around their business. Owls of all colours flying above their heads, rolls of papers tied to their legs. Glass buckets full of chrysanthemums, in all colours, in all sizes. Kei’s chest seizes at their sight, remembers them blooming on Kuroo’s shoulder blades. Window displays full of jars with swimming eyes and lizards and dried roots. Liquids of all colours and jade recipients. Silk dresses suspended in the air, waving at passer-byes, inviting them in.

Kei’s heart thumps loudly in his chest. How could his mother reject a world like this?

There is no time. Longing is an old friend, and Kei’s heart aches with it.

Shouyou stops in front of a building with white walls, now gray in the hazy sunlight. The windows’ frames are all black and above the door hangs a wooden board. It says “Funeral Home” in cursive handwriting, and cats drawn in black ink curl around the letters. The irony that isn’t lost on Key. No light comes from the inside, and the candle in the tiny lantern by the door is not lit up.

Shouyou knocks once, twice. Taps his foot on the ground as sounds come from the inside.

Miya Atsumu answers the door, and his eyes flash in surprise when they fall on them.

“Shouyou. What are ya doin’ here?”

Shouyou pushes past him and into the store. “You didn’t call. Where’s Kuroo? Is he okay?”

Kei follows through, shoulders slumped, trying to make himself take as little space as possible.

Miya Atsumu looks at him. “Who would have known ya were scared of blood. Aren’t ya studyin’—”

“Atsumu.”

He snaps his mouth shut and glares at Shouyou.

“Where is Kuroo?” Kei looks around at the coffins displayed in the room, at the flower crowns hung up on walls. White chrysanthemums and red spider lilies. Their sneakers squeak on the clean tile floors. He looks at the strange letters and diagrams carved in the sides of the coffins, written on the ribbons that hold the crowns together. The air is charged with electricity and Kei’s hair raises on his arms.

“My son is resting.”

In the doorway to the backroom, Kuroo’s mother stands tall. Short black hair, sculpted cheekbones, green slacks, black silk shirt. Her eyes shimmer like liquid amber in the weak light, and when she tilts her head to the side, much like a cat assessing its prey, it reminds Kei—of Kuroo. The same lips made for laughing, the same hands made for creating. Her bare arms are covered in flowers, tiny lilies of the valley all the way until they get lost under the short sleeve. Silver rings curl around her every finger, laurels that seem to move whenever she moves.

Shouyou is the first to talk. “Will he be okay? Can we see him?”

When she smiles, the room lights up with it. Her limpid eyes sparkled green. “Why?” She’s looking at Kei. “Why do you want to see Tetsurou?”

How do you say to a mother that you’ve heard that her son is dying? No language can express that.

The grief Kei feels is acute. “We’d like to, uh, see him one last time.”

Miya Atsumu’s eyes snap to him. “Tsukishima, that’s not—”

Kuroo’s mother takes one look at them, assesses the fear present in their eyes, and then she starts laughing. “Oh, boys.”

“That’s not what’s goin’ on,” Miya Atsumu says eventually. He is chewing on his lip, hands on his hips. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up and his tattoos are a sea of tumultuous black, petals overlapping each other. When Shouyou kicks him in the leg, he at least has the common sense to look sheepish. “In my defense, I had just found out.”

Kei’s grief demands answers. “What is going on?

The laugh fades out, gradually, like a summer rain. “So you are Tsukishima Kei.”

He nods, not trusting his voice.

“Did you perhaps think my son is dying?”

“Is that not what he’s—” But he can’t finish the sentence. The words are thick like honey against the walls of his throat, making it impossible for him to breathe, to swallow.

“Oh, dear.” She touches the tips of her fingers to her cheek in a delicate gesture. “My son is not dying.”

“What?” Shouyou asks the first one to say anything. “But, he—”

“Not dying. He’s just going to be a cat—” she pauses, her eyes on Kei again, “—forever.”

When no one says anything, she offers, “Maybe you’d like to sit down?”

Shouyou is glaring at Miya Atsumu, but Kei, Kei doesn’t know what to do with himself. He presses his thumb into one of his cuticles until he draws blood. “What do you mean? Curses are supposed to be deadly.”

“Not this one. It just affects his ability to turn back into a human after the fall equinox.”

Shouyou leans forward, hands stuffed in his back pockets. “When did this happen?”

“Technically, his curse started when he turned 18.”

Shouyou mouths the words as he’s counting. “Nine years?”

The mother smiles. “Yes. Literally, no one knows when—how— it started. The whisper is that a witch tricked a demon to get out of their bargain. In turn, the demon cursed all witches who could turn into a black cat.” She flaps her hand in the hair, fingers catching against the light. “A curse old as time. Many have tried to break. Many have failed.”

It’s Miya Atsumu who cracks the tension as he sneers. “You sound like a bad fantasy TV show.”

The woman picks up a fir branch and hits him with it. “Don’t be rude. I will tell your brother.”

Miya Atsumu tilts his chin up offensively. _Do it_ , it says. His flowers curling into themselves are the only clue that the remark bothers him.

“So Tsukishima Kei, are you going to be doing something about it?”

Kei regards her, this woman, Kuroo’s mother, his heart still tethering on the edge of something. She can’t be older than his mother, she barely looks older than them. But her eyes shine with confidence and it’s all directed at him. He’s not used to it. What can he do? He’s human. He says as much because it’s true.

She hums, contemplative. “I don’t know about that. He’s enjoying too much being a cat. Do you want to be the dog, Tsukishima Kei?”

Miya Atsumu cackles. Even Shouyou hides a smile behind his hand. When Kei doesn’t move, it’s Kuroo’s mother who makes him move.

“He’s sleeping in the garden,” she says as he pushes him with force towards the back door. That close, she smells like fresh mint and bergamot. It smells like melancholy, like the evenings Kei spent in the company of his grandma.

It smells like home.

“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.” He tries to resist it, but her grip is strong around his arm.

“Call it a mother’s instinct.” Her eyes flash red, just for a moment, and then it’s gone and Kei is left alone in the backyard.

*

The garden is not a garden. It’s a sea of green that stretches into the forest. The sky hangs down low, grey so dense it looks blue. Thin mist twists and turns around birch trees, bleeding orange between blades of grass—or what’s left of it Kei steps forward. The eyes on their trunks are following his every step. Everywhere around him, spider lilies, red like blood. He looks behind him, there is no house. Mountains. A forest. His soul, in the cradle of his ribs.

There, in front of him, Cat.

Kuroo.

Sleeping on a tree stump, tail curled around its body in protectiveness. Its middle it’s wrapped in a white bandage, expanding with each breath. Around him, spider lilies.

“Kuroo,” he whispers.

Cat’s eyes snap open. It lifts his head, alert and its eyes find Kei in less than a second. Black pupils narrow until they’re a thin line and the gold melts around them.

“Kuroo. Please.”

The cat jumps. Runs away in the high grass, away from Kei.

Away from Kei.

Kei takes to running after it.

The air is like ice against his cheeks. It tastes like resentment. Kei opens his mouth to inhale, but his lungs fill with thousands of black butterflies. He coughs and coughs and coughs, spits back sparkling stones. Spits back crystalized cocoons.

He runs.

On the edge of a cliff.

He runs.

On a narrow bridge.

He runs.

Down below, a sea of serpents, blood dripping from their toothless mouths.

 _Please,_ Kei thinks. _Please._

Something snags at his ankle. The smoke—snake—hand crawls up his calf, inside his flesh, touching his bones. Kei trips, falls to his knees. The spider lilies curl around him, pull him down. His breath like lace in the front of his face. Blindly, he reaches out for his bracelet. _It’s going to protect you, little Kei._ His fingertips touch the red string, the fine braid. The silver latch.

_It’s going to protect you._

Kei blinks.

The garden is a garden. It’s a sea of green that stretches into the forest.

In front of him, Cat. Alone; lonely.

“Let me help you.”

Kei takes the first step.

“I am sorry.” He means it. “I don’t—I don’t know how—”

In front of him, Cat. Eyes famished, dripping gold, dripping blood.

Kei takes a second step.

“—how we can fix this, but I promise you. We can.”

In front of him, Cat. Afraid. So afraid, the feeling hangs from the tips of its whiskers, in the corner of its eyes.

“I trust you. I do. Please believe in me too.”

Kei takes the third step.

It’s quick when it happens. Grass grows tall, tall, tall, it drowns them in petrichor smell. The sky falls down around them, raindrops explode like glass once they touch the ground, millions of sparkle dispersing the orange mist with their intensity.

In front of him, Kei can’t see.

Blindly, he reaches out.

The world falls quiet so suddenly, it becomes so still so suddenly, that Kei’s ears ring with it.

In front of him, Kuroo. Mouth made for laughing, hands made for creating. Body, made for holding.

Kei looks at him. Looks at him. “Tetsurou.”

“What just happened? I didn’t turn—I didn’t want to—”

Kei looks at him. “Tetsurou.”

“Tsukki! I’m naked.”

Kei kisses him.

_w i n t e r_

The day is bright, bright in the way only winter knows how to be. December skies, unblemished, so blue, a mirror for the glacial sun. It hasn’t snowed yet, but the campus vibrates in anticipation. It’s the way students hang outside, fingers curled around steaming cups of coffee, the tip of their noses red with frost. They tremble as they look up towards the bare branches, towards the universe. Waiting.

Kei does not like winter. Doesn’t go outside. He likes to watch it unfold like a blanket from behind the window, from the safety of his warm room. In his email inbox, two plane tickets to Tokyo wait for the summer that has yet to come.

It's the weekend and Kei has been studying since morning. He puts down the pen and takes off his glasses. Stretches, the muscles in his back hissing in pain. When he opens the window, just a touch to let fresh air in, the glass steams up. He draws a smiley face. Next to it, a cat with pointy ears.

Behind him, on the bed, Kuroo stirs awake. He hasn’t been able to turn into a cat ever since September, but he sleeps just as much as one.

“Cold,” he mumbles as he pulls the pillow around his face.

Kei snorts. Leaves his desk behind, the window open, to get in bed next to Kuroo. It’s warm, so warm.

“Just a second,” he whispers against Kuroo’s temple, fingers dancing on the hem of his shirt. When he touches his skin, Kuroo startles. When he opens his eyes to glare at Kei, his pupils narrow, two black almonds in a sea of gold. Like a cat.

Kei laughs, lips pressed to the side of his head. “You’re gonna suffocate under all these blankets.”

Kuroo might not be a cat anymore, but he has the agility of one. He’s on top of Kei in less than a second, hands pressing into pillows, lips pressing against lips. Kei cards his fingers through the black, untamable hair, opens his mouth, melts against the sheets. Kuroo takes and takes and takes until Kei is left breathless.

Flowers bloom underneath Kei’s fingertips. Two hearts beat as one.

Summer awaits for him in Sendai and Kei is taking Kuroo with him.

“Kei,” says Kuroo and kisses his eyelids. “We’re holding a festival.” He kisses Kei’s forehead. “For Yuletide. Starts on December 21st.”

Kei turns his face. Lips land on his ear, making him giggle. Thinks of the last festival he went to and terror grips at his heart. He shuts it down, because Kuroo is there with him, in his bed. He’s not going anywhere. “I don’t know if I can come.”

“It takes place inside.” A kiss against the bones of his cheeks. “Good food, good company.”

Spring, on the brink of the equinox. The same conversation, but different rules, different stakes. “And what if I don’t come.”

“Non-negotiable.” A kiss on the tip of his nose.

“I do have to go home at some point. I can’t avoid my mother forever.”

A kiss on the edge of his jaw, where bone meets the curve of the neck. “I can come with you.”

“Please don’t give my mother a heart attack on Christmas day.” Kei gasps when Kuroo’s lips slide down, wet and a little chapped from biting them constantly.

“Yule. It’s Yule for us.” Kuroo breathes. Nips at the sensitive skin until a bruise blooms in red.

Kei’s mouth is dry, feels like sandpaper. The little silver snake curls around his wrist, over his tendons. “Okay. Yule.” He laughs. “Do we get to drink alcohol?”

A kiss against the corner of his mouth. “Only if you kiss me under the mistletoe.”

“That doesn’t sound like a real rule.” Kei is boneless against the mattress. Tilts his head up to catch the cool breeze coming from outside. Closes his eyes when Kuroo drags his teeth over his chin. It’s too hot under the blankets.

Kuroo suddenly lifts up, palms on either side of Kei’s head. A mischievous glint dances in his eyes. He inhales, and then he starts singing.

“Baby, You know the rules and so do I—”

Kei is horrified. “No.”

“A full commitment's what I'm thinking of—”

“Stop it. Kuroo—”

“You wouldn't get this from any other guy—”

“I’m not coming to your stupid festival—” but Kei is laughing. God damnit, he is laughing. He’s never felt lighter in his whole life.

“Never gonna give you up—”

Kei presses his smile against Kuroo’s, swallows his words and his laughter, until they topple over on the floor, hands under shirts, the winter chill in their bones.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #111: "Shapeshifter-AU: Tsukishima really likes his quiet dorm-life. But why is there this strange black cat, that keeps following him into his dorm? And why is Tsukishima so totally fine with it?"
> 
> Dear prompter, I have no excuse for this monster. I had so much fun writing this and I hope that you'll like it. Thank you for indulging my wish to make Kei superstitious. 
> 
> The summer festival is based on Romanian tradition called "[sanzienele](https://www.pure-romania.com/sanziene-celebration-people-still-believe-magical-practices/)". I used to take part in such festive gatherings when I was young, and they were so much fun, but way tamer than I have written in this story. There were no food stalls and no magic stuff. Just a bunch of kids having fun and trying to jump over a very very small fire because it was said it brings good luck.  
> Here are the clothes they are wearing at the festival (traditional romanian blouses): [kei](https://www.blouseroumaine-shop.com/ro/camasa-traditionala-barbati); [kuroo](https://www.blouseroumaine-shop.com/ro/ie-traditionala-lucrata-manual-hortensia); [hinata](https://www.blouseroumaine-shop.com/ro/ie-traditionala-cusuta-manual-cu-broderie-rosie); [tadashi](https://www.blouseroumaine-shop.com/ro/ie-traditionala-romaneasca-anna); [tobio](https://www.blouseroumaine-shop.com/ro/camasa-traditionala-cusuta-manual-cu-motive-transilvanene); [atsumu](https://www.blouseroumaine-shop.com/ro/ie-cusuta-manual-motiv-romb). 
> 
> To the lovely mods, thank you for organizing this fest. It's been wonderful and this fest helped me get out of my writing slump. 
> 
> you can talk to me on [tumblr](https://remapped-soul.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/remappedsoul)
> 
> P.S.
> 
> Kuroo: [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) is going to be our wedding song  
> Kei: [exits chat]


End file.
